Hi @g3uiss , if you have set a retention of 7 days, then you will have restore points during the last 7 days. If you have scheduled a synthetic backup on Saturday : then the full will run at Saturday and no other day. If for some reason the machines are not active on Saturday, the full will not run. The schedule of the day for the synthetic full is fixed to that day!

If a full never happens, you will have a forever forward incremental chain, a new backup chain will never occur which is not recommended as a primary backup job.

More information regarding retention : Short-Term Retention Policy - Veeam Backup Guide for vSphere

More information regarding synthetic full : How Synthetic Full Backup Works - Veeam Backup Guide for vSphere

Would you suggest a full backup at a day when I know these clients are on line. I think you can schedule that ?

Or would a forever forward be a better solution ?

Hi @g3uiss , a scheduled full backup is always recommended in a primary backup job. If you choose a synthetic, every day of the week can be scheduled, your choice when. Forever forward incremental job is by design for a copy job, recommded as a secondary job to have a copy of your backup. Have fun!

Morning! Here’s a good reference for more information:

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agentforwindows/userguide/backup_job_advanced_backup.html?ver=50

In summary though you have no benefit to telling the system to make these full backups when it will never run. You could potentially use the BIOS on these machines to boot them on a schedule so they’re available (less than ideal if they’re laptops) so set them to a day they’ll most likely be online.

Also as you’re licensed with the community/free edition you can’t use synthetic full anyway, only active full. Licensing feature comparison here:

https://www.veeam.com/veeam_vaw_val_vam_11_editions_comparison_ds.pdf

So if you schedule active fulls for a day you know the machine is most likely online that will be best for guaranteeing your restore chain.

If the dates the machine is online are extremely sporadic then you can create active fulls manually/via command line/script and control this in a more granular way

Another potential option if you are into automation you could use the BIOS as noted to schedule power on for backups or if you have servers like HPE/DELL you could use the remote interface (iLO/iDRAC) to power on the machines for backups then power off.  This would take some scripting and testing but I would think possible.  I have used these before to power on servers with scripts but it does take some tinkering.