@David Gugick, my concern with Forever Incremental is how reliable (and timely) will a full restore be if the backup chain has hundreds of incremental backups. The retention policy would take care of changes to files, but what if there is at least one new file every day for a year, and I run daily incremental backups? Is my concern valid?

Thanks @David Gugick. I am referring to File/Folder backups. I think I will go with your recommendation. I have been doing Forever Incremental but I would like to instead go with Forward Incremental which would create periodic full backups and start a new backup chain, after which an older backup chain would be purged. I am having a hard time figuring out how to accomplish that using the CBB Hybrid Backup wizard retention settings. Specifically, how do I force periodic full backups, and then control when an entire backup chain (a full and its subsequent incrementals) is purged?

The silence is deafening ;-).

I would appreciate any input I can get on the value proposition of the new backup format vs the legacy format. Obviously, deduplication is one. The new format also provides separation between backup plans - but I'm not sure what that means to me.

FWIW, I just ran a deduplication analysis on my 1.2TB local storage and determined deduplication could shave approximately 150GB on a full backup. I assume I would see a similar percentage on future incrementals. Here are my dedupe percentages by data type:

Documents and general data: 6.87%
Photos/images: 3.83%
Music: 0.67%
Videos and NLE projects: 16.77%

I just created another ticket because I never received a ticket #. Let's see if I get one this time. The delay has been ok as it has given me some time to research and think through my backup strategy. I've asked support to comment on my current thinking which is to:
1. Perform CBB for Windows backup of my PC's data volumes to my NAS
2. Perform CBB for Windows synthetic full backup of my PC's data volumes to my new B2 (S3) Bucket
3. Perform Synology backup of my NAS to a local USB drive.

My thinking is this will let me avoid the sync issues that seem inevitable in the hybrid model, while also giving me two alternative backups that are each also backed up independently (by BB and Synology).

@David Gugick I submitted a ticket Saturday but haven't heard back yet. In the meantime I have decided I am ok with creating a new B2 bucket and going that route. I would appreciate if you can "bless" the approach I plan to use which is to clone each of the two hybrid backups I was running and change each to the new target B2 bucket. I assume that will create a new repository for each of the cloned plans. Once running smoothly I will delete the previous two plans which I expect will also delete their repositories. Sound about right?

As mentioned earlier, I am on 6.33. I expect to go to 7 later this year. Is there anything in what I plan to do that I should rethink in preparation to going to 7?

Finally, this experience of losing my NAS has been a bit disconcerting regarding the inability to sync a hybrid backup if the local backup becomes out of sync with the cloud. Even if I had a backup of my NAS from one week before it failed, wouldn't I still be unable to sync the local backup to the B2 backup? It seems more fragile than I would have anticipated. Hopefully, you can help me understand if this isn't the case.

@David Gugick Does the consistency check flag or somehow warn of unfinished files in a Hybrid backup scenario? I'm using CBB for Windows Hybrid backup to 1) encrypt my data, 2) back it up to my NAS, and 3) back that up to Backblaze S3. Is it possible I have undetected unfinished files on BB?

@David Gugick, Support got up with me quickly with exactly what I needed. In case others run into the same problem, here is what I did differently: Instead of using the Hyper-V Quick Create, I used the Hyper-V Manager to create the VM, and THEN connected to the vhd. I am now confident I can depend on CBB for a bare metal restore should I ever need it.

Will do. The vhd version just failed at 33% complete.

@David Gugick, I followed the instructions in the blog post for creating a vhdx. The only difference is Windows 10 Hyper V Quick Create doesn't now give an option for generation 1 or generation 2. I assume that has changed since the blog article was written in 2005. At any rate, I ran Hyper V Quick Create twice again and it failed at about the 25% completion mark. Is there a way to test the integrity of the vhdx?

In the meantime, I plan to do another CBB restore, with vhd instead of vhdx and see if that makes any difference.

Thanks David for the response. I've been fiddling with this and am able to schedule the backups in Windows Task Scheduler using the CBB command line interface. It will be easier to manage when it is integrated into CBB, but this works fine for now.

I've just experienced the same problem - my PC failed to wake for a 1am backup. Like others before me, mine is sleeping, not hibernated. Is this something that should now be working, or is it still in development? I'm on the current version of CBB for Windows.

Is there a technical reason why restoring individual files or folders in an image backup can't default to their original location? My retention needs generally apply at the volume level, so image backups would be a great solution IF I could more easily restore groups of individual files and/or folders.

David, I may have to back off my earlier criticism regarding documentation - I've found some pretty useful information about the CBB repository today. That said, I do have these additional questions I hope you can help with. I appreciate your assistance.
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1. Before I even knew there was a repository I was doing a lot of testing. I would create and run a backup plan, do a restore, and delete the backup data using Windows explorer, and delete the test backup plans. I have now executed the "shrink database" but I assume there are a lot of leftovers in the repository. Is there a way to reset it before I start from anew with my real backup plans?

2. Recall I am backing up my PC to my Synology NAS and to Backblaze B2. As insurance against ransomware I would like to perform regular BTRFS Snapshots of my NAS backup folder. Then, if my CBB backup on the NAS becomes encrypted, I would roll back to a snapshot prior to the infection so I could restore my PC from the NAS. But then the backup would be out of sync with the CBB repository. Am I correct that I would need to Sync the repository before restoring to the PC? I've read some older posts where users had problems with large syncs failing. Hopefully that is a problem that has been resolved. Any best practice recommendations for the scenario I describe?

3. Assume I have 2TB backed up on Backblaze B2 and in the future decide to move to a different cloud service. What is the most efficient way to delete all of B2 backup information from the repository? I hope it is as easy as deleting the backup plan in CBB and shrinking the repository.

4. Can I safely convert a local files backup plan to a hybrid plan?

5. Can I safely change encryption or compression settings in a backup plan after it has been run?

Thanks David. Just to be sure I fully understand, please confirm the following is correct:

After an initial full hybrid backup of my data volume to my Synology NAS and my B2 S3 bucket, I will do daily hybrid backup of changed files. All versioning/retention will be managed by CBB. If I lose the original PC data volume AND the NAS backup I can copy the Backblaze restore disk drive contents to the NAS, and then reconnect CBB to the NAS and do a point-in-time restore from the NAS to the PC data volume.

If, on the other hand, a single folder of a few GB data is corrupted on the PC and NAS, I would just use CBB to restore the folder from B2 to the PC and the next CBB hybrid backup would put everything back in sync.

David, I have followup questions regarding CBB versioning vs B2 bucket versioning. I want to feel comfortable about my ability to recover a 2+ TB data backup from B2 should I experience a ransomware attack and need to do a full restore from a point in time before the attack.

My concern: if CBB is doing the versioning does this eliminate the ability for Backblaze to prepare a point-in-time snapshot of my backup, which they can then send to me on a hard disk. If I am still able to use Backblaze's snapshot on a hard disk, am I able to use CBB to do the restore?

If I'm wide of the mark here, what is the recommended best practice with CBB for protection against ransomware?

Thanks for your help.

David, what is meant by "We don't create (or support) multiple file versions on B2"? Example, if I have a file on my PC that is changed prior to every new backup (file or image) will my B2 backup contain all versions of this file (in accordance, of course, with the retention policy I have set in CBB)?

This also brings to mind another question: Can the same B2 bucket support both file and image backups at the same time, or should I create a separate bucket for each type?

Also fyi, my current backups on B2 S3 are tiny and strictly for testing - there is no value to me in keeping them.

Again, thanks for your help as I navigate these new waters.

David, thanks for your response. I want to adhere to your recommendation regarding no B2 retention. Am I correct in my understanding that this will reset everything following my testing:
1) empty my B2 S3 bucket
2) disable B2 S3 retention
3) invoke CBB Synchronize Repository

I sure had a brain lapse on this. I was using a local disk for storage target thinking it would be an easier way to test and learn about synthetic backups and restores. Duh. I do have a B2 S3 bucket that I will be using for my real backups so I will give that a go. Thanks for your help (and patience).