AVVI Disk->Dedupe->Tape

[bn8959]

Hi,

I would like to run backups of our VMWare infrastructure in the following format:

Weekly:

Full VM backup to dedupe store, then the duplicate backup to tape (all sensible and works)

Daily:

Differential VM backup to dedupe store, then duplicate a FULL backup to tape - ie. a synthetic full backup

That way we can run quick incremental backups, but be sending full backups off site on tape. Is this arrangement possible - I think it is with standard synthetic full backups, but I am not sure about doing it with AVVI and dedupe.

Currently the daily jobs just run full backups to get my required backups on to tape.

I am using Backup Exec 2010 R2.

Thanks in advance,

Ben

[Colin_Weaver]

Ignoring DeDup and Synthetic for a moment - if you do a Differential AVVI set to a Backup to Disk folder - then when it comes to a restore the complete VM you only select the differential set anyway and the restore knows to also restore the full (which from a usability point of view is a bit like a Synthetic anyway) The restore process actually uses vStorage API to recover the Differential first and then recovers the Full into the Differential (which is kind of the wrong way around compared with a normal File system Full and Differential restore sequence)

Now if you add in Synthethetic we would would somehow need to reproduce a setcopy/duplicate operation that does what the VMWare API does during the restore and as that program code is not Symantec code - I don't think it is currently possible.

Because of the above I doubt DeDup is the limiting factor.