Synthetic Full Backups: How They Enhance Backup and Recovery

What Are Synthetic Full Backups?

A traditional full backup can be problematic: “It puts stress on the primary storage, especially with the explosive data growth” that state and local is seeing, says Rick Vanover, vice president for product strategy at Veeam Software.

With a full backup, “we’re hauling a lot of data from the source to the target,” Vanover says. That can slow operations and delay service delivery. Synthetic full backups streamline that process, taking the data from the last full backup and recording incremental changes.

“Instead of doing a full backup of your entire system every time, which can be time-consuming and put a lot of strain on older legacy systems, a synthetic backup only creates a new backup one time, and then it does incremental backups,” says Chris Montgomery, field CTO for Security, Americas, at Commvault. “From that, you get a new, clean backup at an interval that you specify.”

How Do They Work?

Synthetic full backups record incremental changes. “The IT team might say, ‘You know what? Monday’s a great day! Let’s start backing up,’” Vanover says. “We’re going to take a full backup today. Then Tuesday comes along, and we’ll look at what’s changed since Monday. We’ll have just the increments.”

The team can do that as often as it deems necessary. At the end of the week, “we have the full backup from Monday, and then the incremental backups the system can read — a synthetic full backup,” he says.

The IT team has granular control over the process, which streamlines and simplifies what has traditionally been a labor-intensive undertaking.

To run a synthetic backup, “you set up your system to initiate the first full backup of your data. After that, you’ll run incremental backups that capture only the changes since the last full backup was done,” Montgomery says. “The software then basically merges the two together and only keeps track of the most current information.”

This approach “is smarter, it’s faster, it’s definitely more efficient,” he says. “Because you’re getting the most up-to-date, current version of your data on such a regular interval, you are better positioned should you have to go back and execute a restore function at some point.”

Given the potential power of this strategy, it’s worth taking a deeper dive into some of those benefits.

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What Are the Benefits of Synthetic Full Backups?

Montgomery, a former state CIO and CISO, sees several advantages to this approach. First, he points to the reduction of overall system strain.

“When you run a full backup, it really locks things down. The systems start to crawl, and you get user complaints. The experience isn’t great, because all your computing power is tied up running these backups,” he says.

Rather than bog down network and system capacity with a full backup, IT can leverage synthetic full backups to keep the wheels turning at speed. “You have to keep business going, you have to keep the mission up and running,” he says.

Incremental backups also support government accountability. With this approach, “you have an audit trail. You need data from a week ago, from three years ago? No problem. Longer-term retention becomes very easy with more interval retention,” Vanover says. “When discovery comes up, you can pull it out of there.”

By the same token, synthetic full backups support overall resiliency. “Speed of recovery is a huge advantage here,” Montgomery says.

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“Because of how the synthetic backup is composed, you can get a lot more specific point-in-time accuracy in terms of the recovery process. Those restores become faster,” he says. “The mapping is more current. There’s a lot less searching and analysis that has to happen.”

With less human labor involved, synthetic full backups also help ease the pressure on stretched-thin IT teams.

“There’s less babysitting,” Vanover says. “If I’m doing a full backup and somebody reboots something, guess what? That backup’s going to fail. A synthetic full backup just makes things more reliable.”

Synthetic full backups also give IT teams a budgetary edge.

“An old boss of mine used to say that getting storage is not a problem. Getting the money for storage is a problem. This is an area where the synthetic full backup really solves for that, because organizations can entertain very granular long retention without breaking the bank and without needing just ridiculously untenable amounts of storage,” Vanover says.

For state and local governments, he says, “the synthetic full backup is an absolute gift to anybody who’s really intentional about their IT asset spending and yet has to manage long-term retention.”

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How Can Your Agency Get Started With a Synthetic Full Backup?

To get started with synthetic full backups, agencies should begin by identifying the need.

When running full backups, there are likely systems “that are really being negatively impacted because of performance issues,” Montgomery says. Agencies may face networking problems or worry about cybersecurity issues with their existing processes, and it makes sense to look first at those problem points.

To get a realistic read on the situation, “assess your current backup process. See where the overload is occurring, what’s slowing you down,” he says. Then set practical goals for improvement. “Understanding what you want to get out of this process will point you in the right direction.”

Vanover stresses the importance of this initial effort. “Look at the capabilities of the backup strategy already in place, and then match that to the expectations of the state or local organization. Chances are you’re going to find a gap, meaning the organization is expecting more retention, or expecting better or faster recovery,” he says.

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From that starting point, a shift to synthetic full backups offers “a perfect opportunity to leave bad design decisions of the past behind,” he says.

As you move forward, it makes sense to have all of the key stakeholders at the table.

“There are a lot of additional bells and whistles that come with these solutions. There’s threat intelligence, there’s cyber analytics that are run against the backups,” Montgomery says. “That information is going to be valuable to the security team, and they need to be informed along the way.”

From there, IT leaders can plan to start small. “Let’s pilot it, do a proof of concept first on something that has enough data to be meaningful, where we could accomplish this in six to eight weeks and get everybody feeling comfortable with it,” Montgomery says.

Those initial efforts can drive acceptance of synthetic full backups in bigger, mission-critical systems. This, in turn, can free up IT time and effort, ease the burden on overloaded systems, and help drive the high level of resilience needed in state and local government.