Synthetic Fulls onsite but ship only incrementals offsite?

[bulgie]

Hello, question about B&R 7.0 backing up to a local NAS, then using CloudBerry to copy backups to S3 for our offsite copy, intended as DR only. A small business with a bit over 2 TB of active data.

We are making Forward Incrementals, optimized for WAN. Bandwidth too limited to send Fulls over the wire. We seeded the S3 bucket by sending Fulls on a HDD, and will probably send another Full via HDD now and then -- monthly maybe? That's not decided at this point.

My question is, can I do weekly Synthetic Full backups, but continue to only send Incrementals offsite? My colleague says No, once there's a Full (even Synthetic), then subsequent Incrementals depend on that Full. So we can't restore from just the initial Full from the seeder disk plus all the incrementals since that first Full -- is that right?

Turning off the Synthetic Fulls sure makes restores from the local NAS a big hairy deal, plus the risk of a corrupted incremental wrecking the chain... I'd really like to do Synthetic Fulls for onsite, if it doesn't break my offsite backup.

I know we need something better in the long term but budget is very limited. I am working on getting an EC2 instance with Veeam running on it, and hopefully more bandwidth too, but I'd be grateful if someone could help me with a workable system in the meantime please.

[Shestakov]

We are making Forward Incrementals, optimized for WAN. Bandwidth too limited to send Fulls over the wire. We seeded the S3 bucket by sending Fulls on a HDD, and will probably send another Full via HDD now and then -- monthly maybe? That's not decided at this point

Seeding is the best action if bandwidth is too small for full backup transferring.

My question is, can I do weekly Synthetic Full backups, but continue to only send Incrementals offsite? My colleague says No, once there's a Full (even Synthetic), then subsequent Incrementals depend on that Full. So we can't restore from just the initial Full from the seeder disk plus all the incrementals since that first Full -- is that right?

Your colleague is correct. Incrementals are "deltas" of initial Full backup, so they are useless without their Full backup.

I'd be grateful if someone could help me with a workable system in the meantime please.

Could you provide your backup plan? How many restore points do you need onsite/offsite? Thanks.

[Vitaliy S.]

So we can't restore from just the initial Full from the seeder disk plus all the incrementals since that first Full -- is that right?

Just to make sure we are on the same page - you can restore from incrementals given that you will have a full backup chain available.

[veremin]

In addition, haven’t you thought about updating to version 8 and using backup copy job to a Cloud Connect provider? Thanks.