Item level restore in a restore plan from both the web portal and the agent console. Learned through testing that the source machine has to be on in order to access its backups but still a very useful feature that I did not know existed.

thanks for answering my questions.
I
This is how we would setup a backup scheme based on your requirements:
Local Backup
If you don’t already have one, get a 4-5 TB USB 3.x capable removable Hard Drive.
Set it up as a remote shared device and send both Image and data backups in legacy format from each of your computers to that device. If you have a standard OS build, you really do not need to image every desktop, just your standard OS build and any one offs.
This costs nothing other than the device cost (~$100) and should allow you to keep a couple for weeks of images ( daily incremental /weekly full with a 6 day retention, using legacy backup format.
We keep a year or two worth of data versions and deleted files - as long as we have the drive capacity ( hence the 5TB drive).

Cloud Image backups:
Once you have a set of local Image backups, there is no need to keep more than one or two copies of your standard image in the cloud.
We send daily Image backups to the cloud using the New Backup Format (NBF), with a synthetic full scheduled each weekend. We give it a one day retention. So we have anywhere from 2 to seven copies depending on the day of the week. ( if this is confusing, let me know and I will explain).
Now to keep costs down we use BackBlaze B2 ( not BB S3 compatible) for our Image cloud backups.
Reason #1 - the cost is only .005/GB/mo. Vs .01 for OZ- IA
Reason #2 - it supports synthetic full backups
Reason #3 - there is no minimum retention as there is with Amazon One zone IA ( 30:days).

Cloud File Backups
We would use legacy file format and backup to Amazon OZ- IA with a 90 day retention.
We run monthly fulls and daily block level incrementals.
Understand that a “full” in legacy format is only backing up files that have outstanding block level versions since the last full.
So the actual space consumed for all of the unchanged files and versions is typically not more than 10-15% more than the size of the data on the source.

File Backup Retention policies
Setup a separate daily cloud backup plan for that infrequently used access database and give it a 90 or 180 day retention period. Keep in mind you will eventually have a years worth on the local drive, but that cannot be guaranteed as the drive could fail.
Exclude those files from your normal file cloud backup plan and give it a 30 day retention in OZ IA.
Understand that with a monthly full and 29 incrementals, the previous set of fulls/ incrementals will not be purged until the last incremental of the set has aged to 30 days.

So in summary:
- Get a 4/5. TB local drive and backup files and images from all of your machines using Legacy format to it with as long a retention setting as you want.
- Send nightly images to the Cloud ( only unique ones) using NBF and weekly synthetic fulls. With your 280mbps upstream speed this will be piece of cake. Set retention to one or two days since it is for Disaster recovery not long term retention.
- setup a legzcy backup for your normal files to Amazon OZIA with a 90 day retention, monthly “incrementals” ( fulls in our language) and block level incrementals each day.
- for those infrequently updated access db files, setup a separate backup plan and set the retention to a year or whatever you like.

As for glacier, there is a significant cost to use lifecycle management to migrate from OZIA to glacier- $.05 per thousand objects. For small files, you will wind up paying more just to migrate them than you will save. . When we have a particular folder that holds large files ( over 2MB each on average ) that dont change, we will use Cloudberry Explorer to setup a lifecycle policy for that folder(s) with the large files to migrate to Glacier after 30 days.
in general, I do not recommend using the Glacier lifecycle migration. Not worth the trouble.

So I apologize for the lengthy and perhaps confusing reply, but there are a lot of factors to take into account when optimizing backup strategies.

A few questions first:

• Do you plan to do image backups - I believe the newer version allows image backups of desktop OS’s
• Roughly how many files and how many GB’s are you backing up?
• What ISP upload/ download speed do you currently have?
• Are you sure you want to “keep # of versions” vs say a 30 or 90 day retention period for versions?

I would be happy to help setup your Image and File backups regarding when to use Legacy and when to use NBF formats for both Local and Cloud storage as well as helping choose the optimum backend Cloud platform. I have been using MSP360 for 9 years and thus have a pretty thorough undertanding of the product features and limitations. DM me if interested

You are right, there is no setting for "purging deleted files" with Hybrid as there is with standard Legacy file backups.
We do not use Hybrid Backups; we simply run separate plans to Local and Cloud storage.
We run local backups every four hours and keep 2 years of versons and deleted files since there is no cost to do so. We might lower that to one year if the local storage capacity is smaller, but with the cost of a 4-5 TB USB drive these days, space is rarely a concern.
We keep Cloud storage versions for 90 days (on two separate cloud platforms) unless the customer pays for extended 15 month retention (recommended for CPA's and legal firms that often touch their client files only once per year).
Can you help me understand the need for a hybrid backup?

Backup Fan - I understand your concerns with BB and Wasabi - We actually use them as a SECOND cloud backup after our primary - Amazon S3 IA

I do not believe that any of the Glacier options support the in-cloud copying necessary for Synthetic fulls. Curious as to why you want to use Glacier - I know it is less expensive, but BackBlaze and Wasabi are not much more per GB and they do support the Synthetic fulls.

I am glad the deletions are working for you. The empty folder thing is a known issue.
I find that doing periodic consistency checks avoids repo sync issues that can affect the purge schedule.

Lukas -
I am going to be honest with you, unless I am totally misunderstanding your question, I think that you would be wise to keep using the legacy Backup format.
Recap of how Legacy works:
- Files get created or modified and are backed up to Wasabi.
- If they never get modifed or deleted, they simply stay in Wasabi forever.
- If a file gets deleted, it stays in Wasabi for 90 days (based on your settingin Legacy for deleted files)
- A "Full" backup in legacy mode is actually an incremental backup. It simply backs up any file that has had a block level incremental done since the last "Full". This is typically only a small subset of your entire backup data on Wasabi - since the vast majority of space is consumed by video files that will never change and will never need to be backed up again.

Lets look at how FFI would work in your scenario:
1. You re-upload all of the existing data to Wasabi using the new backup Format.
2. You set the FFI interval to 90 days - or let Intelligent retention do it for you because of the Wasabi early delete penalty for objects less than 90 days old
3. Each night, only files that have been changed or added that day get included in the incremental backup
4. If a file gets deleted, it will be kept in the cloud for the FFI interval - the same as for file versions.
4. At the end of 90 days you will have one true Full backup and 89 incrementals.
Here is where it gets dicey:
On day 91, the system takes one more incremental - then starts creating a brand new "Synthetic" Full which uses the 'in-cloud copy" feature of Wasabi to create a brand new Full - Just as if you reuploaded the files - even ones that have not changed..
Now this would be okay except for one issue: The in-cloud copy feature runs at between 200GB and 350GB per hour. You can do the math - but 70TB is going to take a LONG time to copy in Wasabi.
And here is the best part - On day 92 the system will do ANOTHER synthetic full as its goal is to keep no more than one Full and 90 incrementals in storage at any point in time.
I have requested that we be given the ability to schedule when the Synthetic full ocurrs - so that we can perform it once a week on weekends instead of every night.
So you can see that the new format and the FFI are not going to be viable for the amount of data that you have.
And your static video file data type is ideal for the legacy format's "forever incremental" design.
When you move the completed project video files to the other NAS, it will be considered deleted and get purged from Wasabi after 90 days (or whatever you set)

Now my only disclaimer is that if you are actually only storing a small amount of data in Wasabi at any given point in time and the majority of your 70-80TB's are on a NAS and not in the cloud. Then the FFI might sense.
Also, we use BackBlaze as there are no early deletion fees.
Happy to discuss further.
Steve

First of all, we use redirected folders for the majority of our clients, and only backup the server. Workstations are standard builds that can be reloaded faily quickly, and because we encourage clients to maintain a spare (or two) the rebuild of an individual PC is not an emergency.

We do local image backups of the server on a daily basis - Usually weekly fulls and daily incrementals.
This provides full operational recovery in the event of a failure of the OS/Hardware.
Prior to the availability of Synthetic full backups, we did a full cloud image backup only once per month.
We would exclude from the image backup all data folders as well as the temp,recycle bin, etc to keep the size down. In a true disaster, having a one month old image was acceptable as the OS and Apps typically do not change significantly in a month.
We do cloud and local daily file backups as well that would be used to bring the server up to date after the image is restored.
The daily delta for our image backups is typically in the 5-15GB range, due to the fact that any change in the OS, location of temp files, etc will result in changed blocks which need to be backed up again.
With the synthetic full capailty we now run image backups every night for all clients except those with the very slowest link speeds (<5mbps).
The synthetic full gets run on the weekend and takes a tenth of the time that a true full would take.
For those with slow links, we do a monthly synthetic full and weekly incrementals on the weekends.
For our clients who are using P2P devices for file sharing, again, we only do an image of the P2P server, not individual workstations on the network.
Not knowing how your clients are setup it is hard to make a recommendation, but certainly you should have local and cloud image backups, and utilize Synthetic cloud fulls. I recommend using BackBlaze as there is no minimum retention period. And for disaster recovery, there is no real need to keep more than one or two versions of the image in the cloud.
For our clients that have only individual machines with the data stored locally, we simply backup the data files to the cloud (and locally if they have a USB HD device). We do not do image backups unless they are willing to pay extra for that service. ($10/month).
Brevity is not my strong suit :)

The :"repeat every xx" setting seems irrelevant with FFI. With other backups I used it to run a Full every three months and incrementals every week.
With FFI, the frequency of the synthetic full is now dictated by the retention period that you set or by the Intelligent Retention if you have it turned on and your retention period is less that the platform minimum.

The new backup format does not show individual files, just the backup generations with .cbl files.

That is what the image backup is for. You would only need to restore those system files if the system was hosed in some way. As you know, you can restore iindividual files from an image backup, but in my experience restoring an individual system file rarely fixes anything.
One thing we have always done is to include system directories (including appdata user folders) in our local backups since there is no cost to do so. This can lead to errors however, as some of the files are temporary and are present when the snapshot is taken, but disappear by the time the system goes to do the backup. (things like roaming profiles).
Hope this helps.

To your first question, yes this is all doable in MSP360.
As to whether you can take an image of your guest OS’s from VMWare and turn them into HyperV VHDx files - We don’t use VMWare and never have, but I dont see why not.

HyperV is very well supported in MSP360. You run the VM version on the host and it backs up all of the Virtual disks/ machines. We do weekly synthetic fulls and nightly incrementals to BackBlaze for all of our clients. We keep only one weeks’ worth of VM backups as they are only for Disaster Recovery. We also backup the files within the File server VM’s and keep versions for 90 days.
DM me if you want any specific recommendations.

Are you using cloudberry Explorer to verify what files are actually out in the cloud?

Wspeed . given that all the files you upload are never modified and never deleted, the old back up format is probably a better fit. One of the things that has tripped me up is the cost of lifecycle transitions from S3 to glacier. They charge five cents for every thousand objects migrated.
I did some calculations a while back and determined that transitioning to glacier was only cost-effective if the average file size was over half a megabyte.
I suspect the average size of your images is significantly more than that so even in legacy format it’s worth it.
Going forward, we are sending all back ups, file and image,to Backblaze, as it only cost $.50 per gigabyte per month, supports synthetic fulls, and has no minimum retention.
The API call charges are also significantly lower than Amazon.

The new backup format, as I understand it, will continue "where it left off" rather than having to start all over again. But the big thing is the synthetic fulls process data at a rate of 200-300 GB per hour using in-cloud copying. In my experience synthetic fulls take less than -20% of the time that the initial full took. So a full that took 4 days gets done in less than 15 hours - something easily doane over the wekend.

Lukas - When you say you are “seeing things in wasabi that were uploaded over a year ago”, do you mean you are seeing files in backup storage that were deleted long ago? Or just valid undeleted files that were uploaded a year ago.
If the former, then put in a support ticket. If it is the latter, I suggest you read my recent post here in this forum for an explanation as to how fulls and incrementals work.

First of all, are you using the new backup format or the legacy format?
The hardest thing to do is to wrap your head around what “incremental forever” means.
In the legacy format, you take an initial full backup. That captures every file that is on source storage (that you included in the backup set)
After that the ONLY things that get backed up are newly added files and modifications to existing files.
Files that never change ( think .pdf files) are never backed up again. They stay forever or until someone deletes them. If someone deletes a file, it will be kept in backup storage for as long as you set in the “ keep files deleted on source for xx days”. A “ Full” in the legacy format is simply a reupload of the files that had block level incrementals captured after the previous full plus any new files added since the last incremental. These “ fulls” are only slightly larger than the incrementals.
The New Backup format is much more in line with traditional tape backups. You do a full backup of everything - run some incrementals, then do another full backup of everything, even the files that have not been ( and never will be) modified.
Until very recently you had to do a full backup at least once per month, meaning that if you have a 90 day version retention period you would have three complete backup sets in storage at any given time (
(actually four but that is beyond this discussion)
The only thing that makes this even remotely viable is that many ( but not all) backend storage providers have a feature called “ in-cloud copying” which allows the creation of synthetic fulls.
A synthetic full takes all of the unchanged blocks of data in the previous full and copies them, behind the scenes, into a new full. This in cloud copying processes at a rate of between 200 GB and 300GB/ hr, or 55 - 83 MBps.
Back to your question, in the new backup format, there is no separate setting for how long to save deleted files, you simply have x number of restore points based on the retention that you set in the plan. The setting applies to versions of files and deleted files.
The latest feature Forever Full Incrementals (FFI), eliminates the 3x-4x storage consumption problem by keeping only one full followed by x numer of incrementals based on your retention setting.
So if you have 30 day retention, on day 31, a new full will be created using the synthetic full process plus the oldest incremental. This process will happen every day going forward. You end up with a “rolling 30 days” of backup/ restore points.
The only issue I see with this is that for very large backup sets, and/ or companies with very slow uplink speeds, the synthetic full might take longer than the hours available overnight. Not that this is a huge issue, but I have asked MSP360 to consider adding a feature that would allow us to specify when the synthetic full should run, perhaps once per week on weekends.
And that is the short explanation.
Hope it helps.