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BLIB Requires Last Full Backup

JoeH
Level 3

Just wanted to provide a heads up on something we found out about using the BLIB backups for VMWare.

We typically setup the following:

VMDK Full backups using Mapped Full VM Backup
VMDK Incremental backups using BLIB (Block Level Incremental Backups)

What we found was that because the BLIB backup is just blocks it requires the last Full to map off of for restores.  So if you setup a policy where you run a full backup and retain it for 7 days plus Incrementals and retain them for 7 days, when the Full backup expires all of the BLIB incrementals since the last Full automatically expire as well!  Yes you read that correct, all incrementals expire when the Full expires.

This is a known issue or feature of this style of backups but no where does the documentation talk about it.  You should see a technote coming out pretty soon to discuss this so everyone understands how it works.  To work around the issue, we are setting our Full backup to be retained until the last incremental expires.  Or for the example above, we are retaining the Full Backup for 14 days and the Incrementals for 7 days.

Hope this helps, so you are not finding this out after you need a restore.

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