* Carlisle, D Renee <dcarlisle at paychex.com> [2006-10-10 13:26]:
> A "Synthetic Full"  uses the same amount of space as a real full.  You
> can save a little bit of space during the week if you use differential
> incremental versus cumulative incremental, but that would depend on
> your change rate.  I personally, would not use synthetic backups in a
> tape environment.  If you do your incremental backups to disk and only
> the full's to tape, that would be ok.  If you try and create a
> synthetic full off of a weeks worth of tapes it will be cumbersome and
> slow.
> 
> The biggest advantage for us with Synthetic full backups is that our
> backups that used to run for 12 hours on our client systems are now
> off loaded to run on the media server as the Synthetic is being
> created. 

Yeah, the benefit is saving of _time_, not tape.  When the Synthetic
backup is created, it's all done on the media server. The client is no
longer involved and the "new" full will be created as fast as your media
server can go, but it _will_ use a full backup's worth of tape.

-- 
David Rock
david at graniteweb.com