Currently backing up a SharePoint Portal of which the database is not even 150GB. The backup isn’t a VM snapshot, but the Application Aware backup which backs up all the SharePoint Lists, Libraries and Sites.
Been running synthetic full backups on this site for the past 18months.
Noticed the last month that it was reporting that the application size was growing rapidly. Like really rapidly and causing the backup to run well over its allocated time.
Jan 2018 1.55TB – 65hours
Apr 2018 2.86TB – 80hours
July 2018 3.55TB – 100hours
Nov 2018 4.13TB – 120hours
Jan 2019 4.29TB – 89hours (with 8 streams running).
Ran a Full backup.
Ran in 9 hours. Total application size was 79GB.
What the synthetic full does, is append any changes to the Full backup (the first full backup file back before Jan 2018). This keeps the physical backup file footprint small.
Running a Full backup instead of Synthetic backup cleaned the ‘slate’.
So the new schedule we have is:
Full backups once a month
Synthetic Full every other Friday night
Incrementals throughout the week.
Reading Material:
http://documentation.commvault.com/commvault/v11/article?p=11694.htm
Technical Details:
CommVault v11 Service Pack 10.
SharePoint 2010 with March 2018 CU.
Windows Server 2008 R2.
SQL Server 2008 R2.
1 Giant Nerd 