Forum Discussion

mghomer's avatar
mghomer
Level 6
11 years ago

Synthetic Backup

Hi all,

 

Im just playing with BE2012 trial version. And now surching for the synthetic backup option. I cant find it in the help file. I see only the how it works but not how i can create a job with it. 

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO23535#id-SF700176201

and this best practise don't really helps, there is no explanation how to create such a job. That is really frustrating .

The BEAdmin Guide is only shows me how it works as well but not how i can create a such job.

Can anyone help me?

 

Thanks

  • As synthetics requires that the last synthetic full be available along with the inceremental or differential set, then I believe the merge for a new synthetic happens in memory on the media server before being written to the storage device.

    As such Synthetic and a cloud backup together is probably not a good idea as it will be moving a huge amount of data backwards and forwards across the network link to the cloud.

    If your cloud storage is dedup based then forget about Synthetic as Dedup should reduce the data being actually written across the link and Backup Exec 2012's restore view presents a "Synthetic view" of Fulls and Incs (or Full and Last Diff) and then requests any separate pieces of media as needed during a restore. Prior to 2012 you would have to restore from full first and the restore from subsequent diff or inc sets.

7 Replies

  • First, you need to enable the Advanced Disk Based Option (Licenced feature) in trial. Once this is enabled, you would see the Synthetic backup options when creating a Backup to Disk.

  • Hello there,

         For using Synthetic backup you have to install Enterprise Server Option (ESO) license. As you are using BE in evaluation option you will not be able to test the same as ESO option is NOT available for Trail.

    Please refer to the following technote for same.

    http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH179956 : Which Agents and Options are NOT available for evaluation with a licensed installation of Backup Exec 2012

     

    So only way you can test Synthetic backup is by installing Backup Exec core (product) license and then ESO license.

     

    Thanks,

    -Sush...

  • cool thank guys!

    what is about the cloud and syntetic backup?

    I mean if i store 1 TB in the cloud with the initial full backup and make lot of diff backups after that and finaly do the syntetic backup. Does the BE retrieve the all BAckups from the cloud to the local BE server and merge them together and upload it again in the cloud?

    Or merge the backups in the cloud?

     

    Thanks all

  • As synthetics requires that the last synthetic full be available along with the inceremental or differential set, then I believe the merge for a new synthetic happens in memory on the media server before being written to the storage device.

    As such Synthetic and a cloud backup together is probably not a good idea as it will be moving a huge amount of data backwards and forwards across the network link to the cloud.

    If your cloud storage is dedup based then forget about Synthetic as Dedup should reduce the data being actually written across the link and Backup Exec 2012's restore view presents a "Synthetic view" of Fulls and Incs (or Full and Last Diff) and then requests any separate pieces of media as needed during a restore. Prior to 2012 you would have to restore from full first and the restore from subsequent diff or inc sets.

  • so there is no way to do an efficient backup to the cloud?

    I thought that BE only create new cataolg files and pointed within this files to the backup files. This way it will be really cool cloud solution.

    I see now way to use syntetic backup and cloud. 

    Is there any other possibility to backup huge amount of data to the cloud? (10 Tb and more)

    I thought we could do an initial full backup to the cloud and than only do a diff backup every day and somites run an syntetic backup to creatre a new full backup.

    I mean Im talking here about 60 Tb of data from several sites, we would like to save money for lot of tape loaders, servers and so on just install one BE Server and backup all sites to the cloud

     

  • There is no good method TODAY to send backups to the cloud.  It's pure logistics and cost.  How do you send multiple TB's of data over a WAN link, in a reasonable amount of time?  

    Your costs to store 60TB in the cloud will be very high, where tape costs will start to look reasonable...

    Perhaps look to the cloud for archiving, or only for the most critical backup sets.  And not all of your data.  If you think all data as equal and all has to go to the cloud, youre doing it wrong.