• Hunter
    0
    Hello, I was combing through the forums and noticed some old posts that have me questioning. I want to make sure my understanding of backups through the MSP360 client is correct.

    I am using backup agent for Windows and backing up to Wasabi S3 buckets.
    I was under the impression that if I do not select block-level backups, and thus wouldn't have the options to select incremental, that I would be running full backups.
    As I have looked through some old forum posts and documentation. I am confused as to how this functions.

    https://forum.msp360.com/discussion/474/full-backups-refuse-to-run?__hstc=228156866.c48c116024e797d976f042c893ecb76f.1610479507332.1614365544240.1614700758881.22&__hssc=228156866.1.1614700758881&__hsfp=1629535397

    This^ post from 2 years ago, says that there is only ever 1 full backup(initial) and all backups after are incremental forever? Is this still the case?
    I realize that it takes a lot of space for full backups, but we wanted to be performing these for protection against an error or corruption within the chain of incrementals or blocks.


    -What happens if my Wasabi bucket has retention for 6 months and deletes this data after 6 months? Is all of my data toast since I will have lost my original full which all subsequent blocks are based on?
    -Is my assumption correct, or is there a way to schedule full backups that I am unaware of?

  • David Gugick
    118
    what kind of backups are you running? Image or file / folder?
  • David Gugick
    118
    if you're talking about file backups there's no such thing as a full backup as it pertains to the entire set of data. A full just means each file is backed up in its entirety. All retention should be handled by our product. You should not use any kind of retention settings available with the cloud storage providers to remove data independently of retention settings in our product. when you run a backup for the first time all files are backed up in their entirety; each file is backed up as a separate object. When you run any backups after that they're always incremental in nature, meaning, that only the files that changed or are new will be backed up. if you use the block level backup option, all that means is if the file is large enough and only a small amount of that file changed we will only back up the changes. That can help with large files like Outlook PST files that may only change 10 or 20 megabytes per day, but might be many gigabytes in size. With regard to retention and for block level backups, everything happens at the file level, not at the backup set level. If you let our product manage all the retention nothing will ever get removed in an unsafe way. Meaning, we will never remove a full backup of a file and leave incremental block level backups in storage, because that would not allow you to restore. We will only remove the full and related incremental backups when it's safe to do so based on your retention settings.
  • Hunter
    0
    Thank you for the explanation. You cleared up quite a bit.
    However, I still need to be able to leave my retention on some backups for different reasons. Instead of having Wasabi delete the files after 6 months, that bit can be turned off and it allows them to be deleted through external measures after it's 6 months age is up, meaning I can utilize deletion/versioning through your program as you've said. What happens after 6 months?

    Say I have my 6 month retention locked in Wasabi(no deletion options) and within MSP 360 I have retention settings to delete file versions after they're 6 months and 1 week old? Is a new full backup performed to renew the chain?
  • David GugickAccepted Answer
    118
    You need to schedule those backups for full and block level if you're using block level. If you're not using block level then you just run the same type of backups over and over and every file is backed up in its entirety every time when it changes, making retention very simple. If you always want to make sure you keep the last backup of a file just in case it hasn't been touched in more than 6 months and you don't want it deleted from backup storage there's an option for that. The only chains that exist are the full backup of a file and its block level backups if you have that option on. And if your retention demands an older version be removed but there are block level backups that exist in backup storage that require it, the full backup of that file will not be removed until it's safe to do so. So most customers will schedule nightly backups as an example and say once a month or once every two weeks run a backup that'll back up the block-level backed up files in full. But there are no backup sets as I've already discussed. files exist within a universe to themselves and have no relationship to other files.
  • Hunter
    0
    Thank you for the explanation and clearing this up. I believe I have the answer I need to our concerns.
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