Upgrade to Latest VBR 12.1 in forever incr jobs

[BostjanUNIJA]

Hi.

Current VBR version: 12.0.0.1420 P20230718
Primary backup jobs (because of lack of storage space) are configured in forever incremental mode (no synthetic full backups and no active full backups set).
Retention policy: 31 days (no GFS).

Is there any reason why we shouldn't upgrade to latest VBR 12.1?
Are there any issues with forever incremental jobs after the upgrade reported?

In next months when we will expand storage I will try to force the policy to switch to at least weekly synthetic + 1-time monthly active backup because I don't like the forever incremental approach (you have savings on storage level but higher chances of corruption, although we use VeeamSureBackup to check integrity of backups, and also the restore in current scenario is "bad").

[david.domask]

Hi Bostjan,

No known issues on the current version specifically relating to use of Forever Forward Incremental, so should not be a problem with upgrading. Are there specific concerns you have regarding the upgrade and Forever Forward Incremental or just wanting to plan in advance?

You mention that restores are "bad", can you elaborate on this a bit more on what you're seeing specifically? I wouldn't say that it's higher chance of corruption, and with Backup Copies to ensure you meet 3-2-1 and the Sure Backup jobs checking the backups, you have high visibility on the backups and any items that need to be addressed sooner than later.

[tyler.jurgens]

Best advice I can give is to ensure you have an XFS (or at least ReFS) repository for your backups. Then synthetic full backups no longer take additional space, nor do they take very long to create. You can start keeping longer retention than forever forward incremental for the same amount of space usage.