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11 Synthetic backup
In this chapter
This chapter introduces the concept of synthetic backup and explains the synthetic
backup solution provided by Data Protector.
It is organized as follows:
“Overview” on page 253
“Disk backup benefits” on page 254
“Data Protector disk-based devices” on page 255
“Restore and synthetic backup” on page 260
Overview
With the volume of data increasing and backup windows shrinking, performing a
full backup often presents a problem in terms of time and storage space. On the
other hand, having many incremental backups can be problematic because each
incremental increases the time needed to perform a restore.
As backup to disk is gaining popularity due to the high performance and capacity
as well as increasingly lower price of disks, new opportunities have arisen. The
industry's requirements are to minimize the backup window, minimize the load on
production servers and the network, and enable a quick restore. These requirements
are met by synthetic backup.
Synthetic backup is an advanced backup solution that produces a synthetic full
backup, an equivalent to a conventional full backup in terms of data, without putting
stress on the production servers or the network. A synthetic full backup is created
from a previous full backup and any number of incremental backups.
Performing synthetic backup eliminates the need to run regular full backups. Instead,
incremental backups are run, and subsequently merged with the full backup into a
Concepts guide 257