No worries Ian, this is just a BETA release and you still can use the old format for years. You can find all the info about the new format here. In the future we are planning to move to the new format only as it is a natural step of evolution, however, we will always support the ability to restore from older formats and we are talking about few years at least so you will have plenty of time to prepare.

Hi Sergey, many thanks for your prompt reply.

I guess my concern is that my main use is for long term offsite disaster recovery of my photos; I have about 1TB and add to this as days go by. I want to be able to continue to add to my backup for many years to come as I have new photos to back up. I'm currently re-uploading as support for (old) Amazon Glacier is said to being phased out and so I am re-uploading the whole TB to S3 Deep Archive before I lose the ability to add new images to Glacier. I don't really want to re-upload everything again in 2 years time if I cannot continue to add to my old format storage.

I still have the photos backed up in Glacier, so I could wait for the new format to come out of beta before I re-upload everything to S3 Deep Archive?

What would your suggestion be bearing in mind that the new file format is only in beta at the moment?

Thanks, Ian

I had a local backup plan that was running incremental daily backups since June. With the install of v7, it forced a full backup from scratch in what appears to be the new format (based on the backup directory naming)

It seems all of my backup plans were updated to the new format and full backups forced? That was definitely not expected, or wanted.

What kind of backup? Image or File?

it was a file-based plan

Eric, there is no conversion of plans to the new backup format - either automatic or manual. Old plans stay as they were. You would need to create a new plan using the new backup format. When you say a "full" ran, are you saying that every file in the plan was backed up again in total? If so, that should never happen unless there was a change in storage and a corresponding sync / consistency check were run. Can you provide any additional details on what exactly you saw happen when 7.0 ran your existing backup plan?

From my perspective, below is what I did:
1. Upgraded to 7.0

2. I noticed one of my plans (file based, encrypted, to a local storage account) was "Not Scheduled" even though it previously ran every night.

3. I clicked the start icon, and it immediately started a "Full (first run)" backup.

4. When I looked in the local path for the storage account, I saw under CBB_Archive that a new directory was created for the backup. The dir name was a UUID, instead of reusing the existing directory named for the backup plan.

Hope this helps!

Hi Eric,

My old backup plan failed to run at all after the upgrade to v7, so it would seem to me that there are some issues with upgrading to v7 that we should be wary of. See V7.0 existing ... for the details of my problem with v7.

Jon

I thought I'd try a new backup to the cloud (amazon s3 deep archive), using the new format. It's only managed to backup 1.7GB in over 6 hours up a 4Mb/s link - I normally get much more than that.
It says 39 committed parts.
Even though I've enabled compression, the reported value after 6 hours is 0%.
Scanned 1524 files (3.6GB), file to backup 1523, processed 522 (1.73GB), uploaded (1.72GB).
The activity lights on the NAS box I'm backing up from seem to be on constantly.
The filepath of the file being backed up seems only to change every 15,20,30 minutes.
It's all very odd, and I dont' seem to be able to stop the backup plan, it's been "Stopping" for 5 minutes now.

Update from above: the disk lights weren't on constantly, they were the opposite (inactive). I ended up restarting the computer to get control back from the "stopping" job

Support would like you to open a case from Tool - Diagnostic. More below.

Please ask the customer to: open a new support case; send us a set of logs from the machine; send a screenshot showing contents of the "new" destination folder; send a couple of screenshots of Backup Storage tab showing the data uploaded to the "old" and to the "new" destinations.

When would be a good time to start using the new format? I'm thinking I'll parallel my backups and continue current plans but start a new plan backing up the same set of files and directories in the new format. Then when the new format is stable, I can switch over and trash the old buckets. But I don't want to start until you think it is stable. I guess Beta is not stable in truth, so when is the new format expected to exit Beta?

I recommend you stick with the old backup format if you're protecting production data. You can run parallel backups as suggested as a way to both protect and test the new format. We are planning to have it production ready by the end of Q2.

Is now a good time to start switching to the new backup format?

while I'm at it, I'll ask when the new backup format will be supported on linux?

We have been using the new format for several weeks for VHDx and Image Backups to BackBlaze to take advantage of the synthetic full backups.
We are using the MSP version and the thought of having to reupload all of our clients files is frightening .
But for a single user it makes sense to do a parallel backup in the new format now, and once your retention period has expired, delete the old backup set.

While you can use the new format without GFS, the retention flexibility of the legacy backup format is basically lost. You can have one full backup starting out and incrementals on top of that forever, but nothing is ever deleted. If you want to specify some limit retention time, you need to use GFS and have multiple full backups. Each full backup costs a another full amount of storage and (for me a desktop pro owner) eats into my 5TB limit. Further, if I wanted to take advantage of immutability, it only applies to the full backups, not to incremental backups, so one would want to have rather frequent backups, like weekly with a 2 or 3 week retention. That's a large storage multiplier and eats into my 5TB limit too. I'm backing up a few hundred GB on one computer. Maybe I have to buy ultimate? When I look at how crashplan worked (I used to have it before they went to enterprise only), I think there really should be a different way of doing this. What am I missing?

I agree. Veeam (different kind of product I know) seems to have this down. I use both but look like I will only be using Immutability with Veeam for now.