Synthetic/active full backup

[jamerson]

Hi Guys,
on the setting of our daily backup noticed we have those options Synthetic/active full backup.
what is the different between those two ?
we are using incremental with synthetic full backup periodically on Sunday.
see below screenshots


thank you

[Mike Resseler]

Hi Julien,

The active full backup produces a full backup of a VM, just as if you run the backup job for the first time. So you are actually taking the full backup again from the source VM and you probably know that these are very resource intensive and use a lot of bandwidth also.

A synthetic full backup is identical as a full backup in terms of the data but the way it is being created is different. It creates the full backup from the data it already has on the repository. VBR uses the last full backup you have and then the chain of incrementals to create a new full backup. This has an advantage because it produces less load on the production but creates more load on the VBR side. (Much of this can be overcome with the new ReFS technology in Windows Server 2016)

Hope it is clear
Cheers
Mike