Hello Arjen, @QiQQ,

We provide our best practicies for a reason. Full Backup on at least monthly basis is needed because otherwise it will take significant time during restore to just construct the actual data that will be restored - not to mention that at some moment, if there's no near Full, just the download might be even bigger than that of just Full backup.

So, I would suggest you a counter-proposal of sorts:
Onsite - we suggest Full once a week, though it is up to you about the schedule;
Offsite - Full once a month, because in other case it will add up time to just reconstruct the data.

Also, we do have a feature called Synthetic Full Backup which can significantly speed up the Full backups (Image Based ones). This seems perfect for your offsite (however, it's only available for Amazon S3, so kindly take this into consideration).

Hi James,

Sorry I indeed mean onsite 1 time a week a full, but with 2 weeks retention. And monthly for the cloud storage, cloud storage is for the extra backup when onsite will faill. So if it takes more time, it takes more time. It's like a disaster, disaster recovery ;-)

I also tested a image back-up inside the VM, but it really takes a lot more to time to backup then backup on Hyper-V level. And at the moment there is no Syntatic Full Backup option for Hyper-V and there is no Synthetic Full for Azure.

I like Azure more, because I provide almost only Microsoft products to my clients, and as a CSP I also get a percentage back from Microsoft and I can create unlimited containers (buckets) in one account. The last nice thing on Microsoft is that when you buy Action Pack you get $ 100 Azure monthly credits, thats like around 6 TB of back-up.

Hi , Arjen,

I understand your setup more better now and it does seem pretty strong to me.

Indeed it will be better if you back up VM outside of the box because Hypervisor Host (Hyper-V Windows Server) usually has more computing power (not to mention the resource priority like HDD and RAM gets to him first).
And, looking under the hood a little, it is essentially easier to just grab a snapshot of the VM, and then upload it to the cloud - it won't change too much.
We do plan to have Synthetic Full backup option for all Image-based backups (VM included) but I can't share any ETA now.

On the other hand, support for Synthetic Full for Azure will surely come in, too. You will just have to be patient.