This is the best way to do this, perhaps there's a post backup plan script that can be run to restart the service and automatically complete these merges.

Issue still persists across multiple versions, strange I don't find other hyper-v backup providers customers reporting this issue.

This issue remains unresolved. If a backup plan is initiated via chain sequence, it's forced to be a full backup by default rather than block level.

Funny enough, the software developers have completely misinterpreted the issue such that they've also included a "Force Full Backup" option during the chain sequencing section of the plan configuration. The fact that it runs full backups every chain sequence is already the behavior and is the problem!

I've honestly given up on restoring from the cloudberry bootable ISO. When you need to restore a downed machine you need something reliable and fast. Use a dummy machine running Windows, install Cloudberry and sign into the account associated with the backups you're looking to restore from. Add the backup storage device in "restore only" mode for faster detection of backups if you're using a local storage account as restore source. Then pop in whatever drive you want to restore to and use that as the destination for your restore plan. This gets a bit more complex when restoring host level servers running RAID which contains the Windows OS but can be done.

Not sure if this has been sufficiently addressed since the new scheduling options were implemented but what I found works using a similar Local to Cloud image chain sequence setup was this.

Create normal local image based backup plan with incremental and full options scheduled. Do not enable chain sequence.

Create cloud image backup plan with incremental and full option scheduled explicitly.

Let the backups complete the first full cloud image backup automatically. Once the first cloud image is complete, remove the daily occurrence for the cloud plan, then setup your chain sequence from local to cloud.

This has worked reliably for me for new configurations, editing the config file seems hit or miss, especially since the changes need to be approved next time GUI is opened after a config file is edited.