Incremental backups on deduplication disk storage?

[flowww]

Hello,

I'm in the middle of setting up backup jobs for our new Backup Exec Appliance 3600. As it's my first time using a dedupe disk store I was wondering...

Does it make sense to create incremental backup jobs on a dedupe disk store?

(Or shall I only use full backup jobs... because as I understand it, backup size and time should be the same, right?)

Background info...
We want to backup two ESX (VMware) hosts.
On each hosts are 4 VMs with Windows Server 2008 R2.
Granular file restore should be possible from all VMs.

Thanks for your answer,

Florian

[Colin_Weaver]

I think for VMware backups it still makes sense to use an Incremental as this changes the snapshot activity within the VMware environment itself

 If it was a standard RAWS/FileSystem backup then I believe there are pros and cos for either way (possibly depending if Client side dedup can be used or not)

[flowww]

Hi, thanks for your reply.

Thing is, I already tested a lot and I had some trouble restoring files from incremental VMware backups.

So actually this is where I'm coming from and that's the reason I thought about switching to full backups.

Ever heard of such problems? A common issue maybe?

Thanks again, Florian

[teiva-boy]

Incrementals still dedupllicate.  So you would still target EVERYTHING to the dedupe store, and later replicate or duplicate to tape.  General rule of thumb is DISK is where data lands FIRST, then off to tape.  If that disk is the dedupe store, even better.