Forever Forward Incremental Is Now Available in MSP360 Management Console 6.3 (Windows Backup 7.8)

We’re excited to introduce MSP360 Backup 6.3, which comes with Forever Forward Incremental Backup and Intelligent Retention. This addition to the New Backup Format allows storing only one backup generation, including one full backup followed by a series of increments. This new feature helps to reduce storage requirements for the New Backup Format.

Starting from version MSP360 Backup 6.3 and Windows Backup 7.8, Forever Forward Incremental backups are available only with the New Backup Format and for Amazon S3, Wasabi, Azure, Backblaze B2, and S3-compatible storages.

Please note that the Forever Forward Incremental option doesn’t support local storage, S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, S3 Glacier Deep Archive, or Azure Archive.Also, you need to update the Backup for Windows agents to version 7.8 or higher.

To enable this option, create a new backup plan or edit an existing one, go to the Schedule Options step and select the Forever Forward Incremental option.

Avoid Early Deletion Fees with Intelligent Retention

With Forever Forward Incremental, we have also introduced the Intelligent Retention option. When enabled, the software automatically checks cloud storage for a minimum retention period and adjusts your settings accordingly. As a result, you will not pay for duplicated data on storage in case of minimum storage duration and retention policy misconfiguration.

Thanks Alex for posting this new feature update.
I am currently testing the FFI feature for file-based backups going to BackBlaze.
If my understanding is correct, with our 90 day retention setting, once we get to day 91, a synthetic full will occur to roll the oldest incremental into the full (technically vice-versa), thus maintaining one full + 89 incrementals.
This process will result in a synthetic full running each night going forward. My concern is that for large backup sets (> 500GB or so, the synthetic full takes soignificantly longer than an incremental.
If I could make a feature request - allow us to schedule the Synthetic full to run on a particular day of the week so that we can have it always run over the weekend giving us more time to complete it.
This would result in up to six more incrementals being kept in storage than we need, but is worth it to have the ability to run the synthetic full once per week instead of every day.

[reply=“Steve Putnam;10053”] Thanks, Steve! That sounds like a valid use case. Let me talk to our RnD team, and I will get back to you on this