Forum Discussion

ACampbell-SCL's avatar
10 years ago

Synthetic Backup using BE2015

Hello All

I just want to check a concept about Synthetic Backups on BE 2015. I'm using VMware 6 (ESXi and vCenter) and backup the VMs weekly with GRT not enabled. One of the VMs is a file Server which I backup daily (FULL and DIFF).

The Questions are If use synthetic backups:

  1. In a DR situation could I do a restore of the File server VM and then do Synthenic restore to files up to date with the last backup completed?
  2. If so, can the restore be done on a different Backup exec Server? (providing the the media is imported with the encryption keys?

Many Thanks

  • Synthetic backups are supported only for file system data and not VMs.

    And regarding encryption, you can always restore from a different media server. Prior to the restore, just create new encryption keys using the same passphrase.

  • Definitely, not a recommended way to backup. You can enable GRT in the Virtual-based backup and then one single backup gives you either complete VM recovery or a single-file restore options.

    File / Folder GRT restores does temporarily stage the entire VM on the media server if restoring from tape. Not from disk. Secondly, if backing up to tape, you are essentially using up more space than a single VM based backup as you are backing up twice.

    Also, A synthetic backup is used only if one does not run recurring full backups. In other words, only the first backup is a Full backup and all the remaining backups are all incrementals.

    If you really need to run Agent-based backups in addition to the Virtual-based ones, no need for the synthetic feature.

  • So can't I do a full file restore with synthetic full and some incrementals, without the normal full backup available?

    Yes, you can.

  • There is no disk reduction between normal and synthetic backups