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We have recently got a Unitrends 822 and got the backups configured, started with Incremental forever thinking it was the best solution. Support now tells us that running a new full backup once a week is faster for the replication. Is anyone else having to do this.
How much data are you trying to backup and then replicate. We essential have 1.7 TB of data we are backing up, have seeded all the initial backups to our replication site. Now we have 1tb of data sitting her waiting to replicate.
Anyone else have issues like this with Unitrends

4 Spice ups
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Adam - Thank you for choosing Unitrends! I’ve never heard that running a full backup weekly will speed up replication, but our engineers know things that I may not, so I’d like to take this to our support team management. Can you private message me your contact information so that I can escalate your case?

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I haven’t heard that either. We have a slow 3Mb/sec VPN to our replication site, so we feel the pain when we need to do a new full.

BTW, “incremental forever” is really " incremental until the next major upgrade"

Every upgrade so far, the first step in the instructions after the upgrade is do a new Master on all your incremental forever hosts. :frowning:

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Boy I hope that’s an incorrect statement. I’ve got five major file servers (one of them has well over 3.5 million small files – took 3 days to do a full backup across a solid 1Gb pipe over the weekend with no one there) and I’d hate to have to do master backups on them each time a major software upgrade occurs.

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Well theoretically the new master is supposed to be smart enough to still only send the changes via replication, but our replication has been royally hosed for a while so our experience might not be the norm. I’m hoping things get back to normal soon.

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I checked with our development team to get a better handle on why you would need to do another master backup after a Unitrends software update. Here’s their response:

It’s not required but it is a good practice. Specifically for those doing incremental forever strategies. If the update includes any database updates or changes, the new master backup will, for lack of a better word, reset the backups so all future backups are mapped appropriately to the new database fields.

In the past, we’ve seen incremental backups lose their point of reference after an update and it was basically running master backups every day even though it should have been an incremental. A master backup after software update ensures this doesn’t happen.

Please let me know what other questions you may have.

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I’m running the latest and greatesst Unitrends UEB (beta) and no new master was required when I upgraded. None was required for the last upgrade to the UEB or the one previous. I’ve never needed to force a new full unless I did something drastic to the server (like rebuild it, but keep the same name).

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Is Incremental Forever the recommended backup strategy over Weekly Full & Daily Diff with UEB?

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yes.

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Hi,

We were running Incremental forever backups and then replicating. I noticed that there were random differentials being created and asked the question of Unitrends…

"I still don’t understand why it does incrementals and differentials and then replicates them both? Why bother with the incrementals, and just set up a differential schedule? Can you please get someone to explain the theory to me, I have tried to find some docu as to why that happens but it is a bit scarce. All I see is extra space being taken up by backups (the diff’s) that I don’t schedule and have no control over.

and got the reply

Happy to answer. In the Incremental Forever strategy as you know, the backups are being scheduled on as regularly periodic incremental backups (whether it’s hourly, daily, several times daily or some other time scheme). The program decides when it’s going to ‘synthesize’ differentials and masters. Why differentials? This was originally done because when vaulting, unless it is a virtual machine, incrementals do NOT vault; only bare metals, masters and differentials. In order to get the incremental data up to the vault for that data protection, the program decides (usually within about a week to 10 days at most) to auto generate/synthesize a differential to get the data to the vault. Next, after so many days/weeks and dependent on factors (such as upgrades to the environment, how long since last master, etc.) that the system synthesizes a master and it goes to the vault.

Therefore, if the customer is feeling frustrated by seeing a bunch of non-scheduled differentials in additional to the incrementals that they are expecting, then this is how and why it happens. If they don’t want that going on, I would strongly recommend going to a full w/differentials or full w/incrementals schedule. (I personally prefer the daily differential to the incremental because once again, incrementals don’t vault and in a true DR (disaster recovery) scenario, I want my data vaulted as soon as possible. But that’s just me, “your highway mileage may vary” LOL)

So that answered that…

and then I did query that this is meant to be replication and not vaulting but the same theory applies.

So I was also a bit scared about a: having to do new masters weekly/fortnighly whatever etc and then how long it would take to replicate but got this answer

Yes the new master will replicate – but realise that it does a block level differential check against the existing master and only replicated the changed blocks (compressed and deduplicated) across the link – so across a 5Mb link you should be fine. It doesn’t send the whole image over as it doesn’t need to.

Which alleviated my fears re-markedly and after testing i found that the replication worked very fast and very well even for the masters. The only “issue” was that the masters take a little longer to process at the backup stage, but i figure you can’t have it all.

So now we run a Monthly Master that starts on a Friday night and is replicated over the weekend and differentials the rest of the time and it works just perfectly.

Hope that helps :slight_smile:

Cheers

1 Spice up
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Jason - This is great insight. Thank you for sharing what you’ve learned with the rest of the community. If anyone has any questions about Jason’s post, please let me know.