How best to do daily backups of a 1 terabyte drive to another 1 terabyte drive?

Question

Hi. I have a mid-range gaming PC. It has a 1 terabyte internal SSD. 510 gigs are used, of which Steam games are 230 gigs (easily redownloadable), hyberfil.sys is 13 gigs, pagefile.sys is 8 gigs and my VRChat cache is 32 gigs (easily rebuildable). Experiments have shown that this filesystem, when these items are excluded, compresses to 185 gigs and that an incremental each day comes to about 20 gigabytes.

I have a 1 terabyte external disk drive that I want to leave permanently plugged in. Obviously I’d like to keep as many days’ backup as possible, while allowing for reliable backup.

What settings do people suggest I use? Keep backups for _ days, and in the Advanced tab, what should I put for: Synthetic full backup, Active full backup, Defrag and compact full backup file. For the advanced tab, I don’t quite understand them.

coolsport00 · Answer

Hi ​@richardcavell- you haven’t said what product you’re using, but I’ll assume Veeam Agent for Windows Free edition.Those settings are dependent upon your goals Richard. If keeping as many backups as you can is your goal, you just have to determine your daily change rate (on avg), then configure your retention (days of backups) based on that. Then leave some room for maintenance tasks and unforeseen increased change rate potential.To help preserve Respository storage space where your backups resides, yes, it is advisable & recommended to enable both dedup and compression. No need to ‘get in the weeds’ of the levels. For your use case, all you need to do is configure the recommended settings (as shown in the product; “optimal” and “1MB”). If you want to break up your backup chain, which is advisable to do on occasion, you should enable to create either a Synthetic or Active Full. You use Synthetic if the Repository storage you’re using for your backups has “fast clone” technology configured in your storage location’sfilesystem (ReFS in Windows; XFS in Linux). The Full is created really fast. Fulls are created by combining the current day’s backup and all previous Incrementals since the last Full to make a new Full. So the Synthetic Full process is done solely on the Repo storage. Active Full is running a “normal” Full task pulling data from the source location/device(s), similar to what’s done on first Job run. Network traffic is loaded during such a run; whereas with Synthetic, Repo storage is getting hit with task load. If your Repo storage is SSD, and like I mentioned...you have Fast Clone configured, just use Synthetic. Even if Fast Clone isn’t configured...generally I recommend Synthetic. I think that answers your questions.Hope that helps.

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