Included in the description of the New Backup Format when creating a new backup plan on a Win. 10 PRO computer is '-No ability to create or edit plan in the new backup format via Management Console'.
Am I understanding this correctly in that I will need to connect remotely to my clients' computers to perform this maintenance?
IMHO - this defeats one of the main reasons for MSP.
Please advise.
Yes. When 7.2 came out the console hadn't been updated yet. And 7.3 is out now as the latest agent version so you may want to consider looking into that version.
Is the 'new format' fully compatible with the 'current format'?
I am referring to both being able to continue a backup 'chain' and restore?
I do not like nasty surprises :)
The new backup format is not compatible. If you want to use the new backup format to take advantage of any of its features with file, image, or VMware backups, you’ll need to create a new backup plan. You can keep the old backup data around as long as needed and then manually remove. If you prefer, you can stay with the legacy format if you're happy with it.
The new backup format has a some advantages, especially for image and virtual machine backups and file backups that have a large number of files. There's support for client-side deduplication, automatic consistency checks, Change Block Tracking for Image/VMware, Restore Verification for Image, generational backup retention with GFS-style Retention, immutability options with Amazon S3 and Wasabi, and synthetic full backups for all backup types when backing up to supported clouds (Google is not yet supported for synthetic fulls).
The new backup format does not yet support hybrid backups and does not perform synthetic fulls for local backups. It also requires periodic full backups of all data, unlike the legacy file backup format which is incremental forever. So this may not make it a good option for you if synthetic fulls are not supported on your desired storage target.