Incremental backups are a fundamental component of efficient data protection strategies, allowing organizations to conserve bandwidth and compute resources by capturing only the changes made since the last backup. While this methodology is widely implemented, the approach to storing these incremental changes plays a critical role in determining the overall efficiency, reliability, and performance of a backup system.
Traditional methods
Conventional backup solutions, such as Veeam, typically operate by establishing an initial full backup followed by a sequence of incremental backups. During a restore operation, the system must reconstruct the recovery image by merging the full backup with each subsequent incremental file. Although effective, this approach presents several challenges:
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Resource-Intensive Restorations: The process of rebuilding a recovery image from multiple files increases computational demands and prolongs recovery times, especially as the backup chain grows longer.
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Vulnerability to Data Corruption: Corruption in a single incremental file can render the entire backup chain unusable, threatening data integrity and the ability to recover successfully.
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Complex Management: Administrators must meticulously oversee backup chains, ensuring all incremental files are preserved between synthetic or active full backups to guarantee restorability.
To address these limitations, administrators often employ synthetic full backups, which consolidate incremental changes into a virtual full backup, or schedule periodic active full backups to reset the chain. However, these strategies introduce their own trade-offs:
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Synthetic Full Backups: These enhance restore performance but demand additional computational resources and precise scheduling to prevent system overload.
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Active Full Backups: While they simplify chain management, they impose significant I/O demands on the source system, potentially interrupting normal operations.
Additionally, without effective deduplication, traditional methods may result in suboptimal storage utilization, adding further complexity to backup administration.
Figure 1 – Traditional incremental backups require regular scheduled “synthetic full backups” to maintain performance.
A modern approach
Synology ActiveProtect introduces an innovative solution by producing a backup equivalent to a synthetic full with each operation, without the performance overhead typically associated with such processes. Utilizing Synology’s advanced deduplication engine, ActiveProtect captures only modified blocks and integrates them into a standalone, immediately restorable backup image. This approach eliminates the conventional distinction between full and incremental backups, ensuring that every backup serves as a complete and dependable snapshot.
Figure 2 – Synology’s approach to ActiveProtect ensures that each backup is always equivalent to a “synthetic full backup” in terms of performance and recoverability.
Key benefits of ActiveProtect include:
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Simplified Restorations: Each backup functions as an independent restore point, eliminating the need to reconstruct extensive chains of incremental files and significantly reducing recovery times.
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Enhanced Data Integrity: By removing reliance on interconnected file chains, the risk of corruption affecting restorability is substantially reduced.
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Optimized Storage and Performance: Deduplication applied at both the source and destination minimizes storage requirements and shortens backup windows.
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Built-In Immutability: Integrated safeguards against ransomware and other threats ensure that backups remain secure and unalterable without separate storage administration.
Figure 3 – Brief comparison between different backup types.
Meeting Today’s IT Demands with Synology ActiveProtect
In an era where IT infrastructure must reconcile simplicity, security, and speed, Synology ActiveProtect provides a comprehensive platform tailored to these priorities. Its always-synthetic full backups, paired with sophisticated deduplication and immutability features, offer IT professionals a robust, efficient, and cost-effective tool for backup and disaster recovery.
By overcoming the complexities and vulnerabilities inherent in traditional incremental backup methods, ActiveProtect enables organizations to achieve their recovery objectives with greater assurance.