I would say to make sure you are backing up the needed system volumes for the image backup. You can also schedule periodic Restore Verification from the backup plan if you have an available Hyper-V instance. More information here: https://mspbackups.com/AP/Help/backup-and-restore/about-backup/restore-verification

As far as retention, set the Retention Policy for however long you need to keep backups. If you do not need GFS, then you can use the "Keep backup For" option to keep backups for as long as needed. Use GFS if you need longer term GFS retention or need Immutability support for the backups.

Synthetic fulls are supported on all clouds currently except Google Cloud. If you're backing up to a local target, then you'll have to run period fulls, but that's no different than the legacy format for image backups.

As far as the File Backup goes, the same applies for retention needs. For the Full backups, synthetic support is best to avoid having to back up all the data every full backup. If you do need local support and none of the GFS options are needed, then you can stick with the legacy file backups that have version-based retention and no need to run any subsequent full backups.

Thanks for the helpful information David! If you don't mind, I have a few more questions:

• Should non-OS related folders in the C drive be backed up as part of the Files backup plan?
• When doing New Format Files backup, should we skip system volume folders, and have them only be backed up via the image backup? In our case, the server has a folder on the D drive called "System Volume Information"
• Would you recommend we select the option "Do not backup up system and hidden files" in the New Format Files backup plan?

Thank you for your assistance!