Veeam Synthetic Full - Synthetic front point restoration

[NicodepFR]

Hi,

I understood that a synthetic full was constructed from a full + all the increments, so does not use ESX/Vsphere resources

But once the synthetic is created, can we delete the initial full and keep only the intermediate .VIBs? will it be possible to restore this vm to a restore point prior to synthetic full?

Or should I keep all the previous files?

Question related to the To needed, because a full set of all my VMs weighs 9To! So today I'm doing a full at the start of the month and the rest of the time increments, so almost 20TB for 1 month and a day (Full + 30 increments + Full)...



Another question regarding backup verification: is it better to use the health check of each job (very slow) or the Surebackup "backup integrity" function (much faster)?

Thk

[david.domask]

Hi Nico,

No, you need to keep the original full as well. You do not need to manually delete old restore points, your configured retention will handle removal of the old files once the retention policy is satisfied. With periodic fulls, you use the Forward Incremental retention scheme, so the link above should explain it.

Incremental Backups ( vib files ) always need the previous restore points all the way back to their corresponding Full Backup ( VBK file ).

Are you targeting a repository that can utilize Fast Clone? This will help as the space savings from Fast Clone will make the Synthetic Fulls "space-less".

For Surebackup vs Healthcheck, largely a matter of preference. Both will perform similarly, but the job Health Check can perform additional steps to try to repair corruption. Using both is of course suitable if you desire.