David,
I believe the issue that kept us from using chained backups before was that either the subsequent plans would always run as full backups, or would never run as full backups (I can't remember which it was), no matter what the initial plan was scheduled to run. Has this been resolved?
Our goal is to run monthly incremental full backups on each of the plans in the chain. To accomplish this, would we only setup a schedule on the initial plan?

Also, we are not using GFS currently. If we were to use it in the future, should we just set each individual chained plan up with GFS identically? Or does setting GFS on the first plan establish it for the rest of the subsequent plans?

Has anyone else been using the chained backups with success? Any suggestions?

Is the reason that you use legacy for local and cloud file backups due to the amount of storage space taken up by the local backups? In other words, do you keep only one copy of the backup data reducing your backup storage required by about 50%?

If you do monthly full backups and set retention to 30 days would the prior full backup be deleted upon the creation of the new full backup?

David,

Are the chained backups now ready to be used? We are using the new format backups using version 7.4.3.5 . We run some image based and some files plans. I'm referring to the Pre / Post Actions, Execute Following Plan After Backup Completes section of the backup plan settings.

If Yes, are there any best practices or caveats to keep in mind? Any there any factors to consider regarding Execute Full Backup (Synthetic Full If Possible)?

Thank you David!

I see, thank you David!

Hi David,

Thanks. Concerning being able to see the files backed up, and possibly sorting by size via the agent History tab, if it is there I have not been able to find it. I looked at both a local and a cloud image backup plans to try to find this information. Please let me know when you have had a chance to check. We are running new format using MSP360 version 7.3.2.6 in case this matters.

I think that this would be a very helpful option.

One additional feature could be the ability to see in a more granular fashion what is in the backup data. This might allow the administrator to find the files are significant in size, that may not be temp or cache files, that might be candidates to be excluded from the backups.

Are there any updates on this issue? This is an ongoing problem for us.

I believe the agents have been upgraded multiple times since the icons have been updated.
I just created a ticket with support. Thank you!

David, does the new information I provided help give a better picture of what is going on here?

Just to add to what I said before, it seems that we often have times when the backup software is unresponsive when we want to start or stop a backup plan manually from the portal. It seems to take restarting the backup services in order to get the backup software to respond.

We have had a similar issue sporadically. A computer will go offline according to the MSP360 portal, but we can tell its still online through our other monitoring tools. And we can fairly easily bring the computer back online in the eyes of MSP360 if we restart the two backup related services. Out of our roughly 70 managed computers, it seems that we have a few needing service restarts every other week.
We would be interested to hear what Russel's support ticket results in.

David,
Sorry for the slow response. This issue still seems to be present to an extent. Last year, we edited the MSP360 Backup Agent icon by putting our logo as the taskbar and desktop icon. However, it looks like in several cases the icons are showing up as older versions of our icon (we experimented with a few versions of our company logo over time). Obviously we would like to have the newest version of our icon on the backup agents, and this doesn't seem to be happening even though practically all of our client computers are on the 7.3 version of the backup agent.

That is an interesting request. I would be in favor of this feature so long as the user could ignore the message if the user felt that a reboot was necessary.

That is correct. It is not. Thanks for the information. Very helpful.

Thank you David. Will do.

Thanks David. Yes, this is a shared Exchange server. It is Hosted Exchange and as such we don't manage the entire Exchange server. I would prefer not to rely on the solution provider as a failure of both the Hosted Exchange and the Hosted Exchange backup would seem to be more likely having the same provider supply both. The use of Outlook to copy the email files to PST are interesting though I presume that the backup would be slower and larger as a new PST file may be created daily. Would like to include the backup of not only email but contacts, calendars, Notes, and OneDrive as well if possible.

Thank you Alexandar! I see this in the UI but thought that someone mentioned that this feature should not be used yet. I may be wrong. Have you or have others used this feature in MSP360 v7 New Format with success? Any best practices regarding this feature?

Any feedback concerning this question? We would like to chain backups together using the MSP360 version 7 and the New Format backups if this is ready for use.