Progressive Virtual Full™

Save significant time with Progressive Virtual Full™ from Bacula.

Virtual Full saves time, power and resources on the client side by getting data from local storage, and putting everything together to build the new ‘Full’, locally. That’s what is called is synthetic backup. By taking advantage of Bacula Enterprise’s Progressive Virtual Full™ capability, (the ability to backup data within an ongoing, or sliding time-window), you will also save significantly on the local storage.

Using Bacula Systems’ advanced index management (which is a built in technology of our Global Endpoint Deduplication tool), you can now save on the time to read the data locally, and lose far less time to write the data locally while executing synthetic backup.

A hypothetical example of this resource saving can be demonstrated with a Full of 10TB. Traditionally, to create a Virtual Full you would have to read and write it a second time, using the time (and disk space) to create 20 TB in total. However, by instead using Bacula Systems’ advanced index management to create a Progressive Virtual Full, the new Full is built, but only the indexes need to be read – and written. So only 10.2 TB of space is needed in total, and the job is finished in a fraction of the time.

The image on the right shows a progressive virtual full without using either the index management capabilities, nor data deduplication.

The side-by-side image below shows (on the left of the image) what happens when the Deduplication Plugin is used, but without any data deduplication: there is a huge benefit. The image on its right illustrates an even further reduction in required time and disk space, if there is potential for data deduplication. Read the technical support document for more information.

The overall benefit is significant, and this nice gain becomes even greater if your synthetic backup also has good potential for deduplication. The resulting advantage relating to time and disk space makes your life a lot easier, while at the same time saving money for your company. This complete capability is hardware agnostic and delivered independently by Bacula Enterprise, giving you total control over the full process. We recommend you contact us to find out if this approach can be applied to your data center environment.

You can also use Bacula Enterprises’ amazing Global Endpoint Deduplication tool to save time and resources when sending synthetic backups to offsite data centers. Because our deduplication technology also works with one storage daemon to another, using replication techniques combined with Global Endpoint Deduplication brings great efficiency when backing up to offsite data centers.

Further help on synthetic backup:

  • BWeb™ Management Suite is a comprehensive GUI management suite for Bacula Enterprise that provides the data reports, core metrics and analysis that system administrators need to provide to managers. Contact us for a demonstration.
  • Training is available in different locations, depending on the Certified Bacula Systems Training Center you choose.