Thanks, that looks basically the same as the link that was previously posted which apparently only applies to "old format" backups.

We contacted MSP360 Support yesterday as David Gugick had suggested and they quickly responded. They conducted a test, backing up some files then moving them to another drive letter, editing the backup plan with the new drive letter, and continuing the backup. The pre-existing files were not uploaded again. This confirmed the de-duplication feature of the software where data is backed up at the block level and previously-seen blocks are not uploaded again.

Thanks to all who responded here, and kudos to the MSP360 support team for a very fast response and actually testing the feature to verify that it works.

Sounds good, will verify with support. Thanks!

Thanks, please let me know what you find out about dealing with the drive letter change. Since directory structure and date stamps will be retained, hopefully we can get this to work with the new format without having to upload everything again.

My understanding from the team is that Searching is not yet supported when using the new backup format for file backups. We could have done a better job communicating this in the UI. There is a feature request in the system already, but I don’t have a date at this time for when it might be released. — David Gugick

OK, that's definitely a pain but hopefully search will be implemented in the not too distant future since the feature request is in. I believe that the new format is needed for the synthetic backup feature, which is what makes it really feasible to do more frequent full backups in a reasonable amount of time without chewing up massive amounts of storage, so we'd like to keep that.

This is not a deal breaker but lack of a working search function is definitely a major annoyance which makes finding and restoring files more difficult than it should be.

I’ll have to ask Support. There are no specific settings. — David Gugick

Thanks, let me know if they have any suggestions. I can't be the only one having this problem.

Yes, it is the standalone MSP360.

They are file-based backups, not image-based. I just tried another search with the same result, "Retrieving data" message pops up for a fraction of a second and no files are listed. (I tried searching for *.docx files, I know there are a huge number of those. No problem seeing them when restoring, just a chore to find specific files with no search results.)

↪Art Vandelay
I m not having trouble searching on that version. Can you elaborate on the type of backups you are running? I know there was an issue searching with early 7.0 releases, but this was addressed and I can search for exact file names or use wildcards. — David Gugick

We're running synthetic full backups every 30 days with incremental backups every 2 hours during working hours between the full backups. Is there a specific option that needs to be set for search to work? As mentioned, back end storage is Backblaze B2. We're not running RMM, this is standalone MSP360 Ultimate. Obviously without the search function working it can be pretty difficult to find specific files to restore.

It just took me a while to grok the backup strategy. Thanks for your help!

I think I see it now, in the scheduling screen specify BOTH recurring (incremental) and full backup, selecting monthly for full backup, and set desired retention period.

We are using Backblaze B2 storage, which I believe supports synthetic full backups. That seems to be a very desirable feature rather than having to ship everything up the wire for a full backup so I think we'll be sticking with the new format.

Is it possible to configure the chain of full and incremental backups in a single backup plan, or is it necessary to use two? Is there a way to add the monthly full backup to my existing incremental backup plan? (I did not see an obvious way in a single plan to do this, but being new to MSP360 I could well have missed something.)

Thanks, I used the default backup format, which undoubtedly is the new one. There's just a lot that's not clear yet on how things work with MSP360.

What we're after is long-term data retention with the ability to go back and retrieve different versions of files if needed. (We migrated to MSP360 from Crashplan Pro since that service has now restricted backup history.) It appears that "continuous" backup is no longer available (maybe that's part of the old format?), so I have an incremental backup job running every hour. Of course this will ultimately create a huge list of incremental backups, and I'm not sure yet how one would located different versions of files to restore. (Having a differential backup option would be nice.) The periodic full backups which are recommended may help with this.

Is there comprehensive documentation on the current version of MSP360? As I mentioned most of the info out there seems to be outdated.