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Vmware VSA backup, incremental vs differential backup

  • 23 February 2022
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Userlevel 3
Badge +8

Hello,

What is the best solution for VMware VSA backup, use of incremental or differential backups?

currently we use incremental and synthetic fulls, is there any improvement for restores to use differentials backups instead of incremental?

regards Juergen

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Best answer by Scott Moseman 24 February 2022, 04:03

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3 replies

Userlevel 6
Badge +17

Hello,

What is the best solution for VMware VSA backup, use of incremental or differential backups?

currently we use incremental and synthetic fulls, is there any improvement for restores to use differentials backups instead of incremental?

regards Juergen


If you are backing up to disk or cloud, there’s no reason for using differential.  There is not going to be any improvement in restore performance.

Thanks,
Scott
 

Userlevel 6
Badge +15

Hi there,

Well, on my side I do not use diff backups for VM backups.

Only Incremental+synthfulls and once a month at least a real Full. Or, even only full when data change a lot inside the VM. 

Most of them are using advanced block tracking techniques like CBT or so, so it’s quite fast to perform increments or full. 

It really depends on the size of your VMs, their setup (how many vmdks and their size), their change rate, but also your recovery plan.

Maybe the most important improvement for recovery is to use indexing v2 for VSA, that allows multiple streams restores instead of single stream for v1. The more vmdks your VM has, the longer it would take, as it would be sequential in v1. (this is a very trivial shortcut, I know :sweat_smile: )  

Laurent.

Userlevel 7
Badge +23

@Juergen , I’ll defer to the collective experience of everyone here, though I am not aware of too many people using Differentials.  With everything being deduped now, and restores just compiling based on the Index, I‘m not sure Diffs vs Incs would save you much if any time.