Upgrade Backup Plan Format

As of version 7.8.3 of Backup for Windows, you can upgrade your backup plans created in legacy backup format to the new backup format without creating new plans and deleting the existing ones.

The backup format upgrade brings you the benefits of the new backup format such as:

• Grandfather-Father-Son retention policy
• Forever Forward Incremental backup
• Object Lock (Immutability)
• Synthetic Full backup for all backup types
• Changed Block Tracking for Hyper-V and image-based backups
• Consistency check on every backup execution

Supported Backup Types

The format upgrade is available for the following backup types:

• File backup
• Image-based backup
• VMware backup
• Hyper-V backup

Limitations

The MS SQL Server backup and MS Exchange backup are not available in the new backup format, so no format upgrade is available as well for plans of these types.

Also, hybrid backup plans cannot be upgraded to the new backup format for the same reason: hybrid backup is not supported in the new backup format by now.

Prerequisites

Before you upgrade your backup plans to the new backup format, get familiar with some peculiarities.

There are some differences in backup formats in the scheduling and data retention approaches which make the exact application of these settings impossible. Learn about these differences below.

Decide whether the displayed schedule suits your purposes. If it suits, you can execute the so-called forcible update. In this case, the backup plan will be upgraded to the new backup format with no schedule. You can change the backup plan schedule any time you want by simply editing the plan.

Data Purge

If the plan is successfully upgraded to the new backup format with enabled purging of existing data in legacy backup format , data on storage will be subject to the new retention policy: data will be purged according to the period specified in the 'Keep backup for' field on the 'Retention Policy' step of the backup wizard.

If the plan is upgraded with disabled purging of existing data in legacy backup format, this data will not be purged at all and only new backup data will be a subject to retention policy set in upgraded the backup plan.

Upgrade Backup Plan Using CLI Command

To upgrade a backup plan, use the convertPlan command.

The command has the following parameters:

• -n. Plan name
• -id. Plan ID
• whatif. This parameter is used for test upgrade which displays the compatibility issues. Use it for test purposes
• -purgelegacy. This parameter sets if existing backup in the legacy backup format is a subject of a new retention policy or not. This parameter has two possible values: yes and no
• -force. Execute the forcible conversion with automatic application of the incompatible parameters of the plan(optional)

Command Examples

Upgrade the 'Plan name' backup plan to the new backup format.

cbb convertPlan -n "Plan name"

Upgrade the backup plan with the 0d5eec1d-ddbd-4f89-bbd7-9abf87a41221 with a forcible application of some plan settings (Schedule and Retention Policy) that are incompatible in the new backup format.

cbb convertPlan -id "0d5eec1d-ddbd-4f89-bbd7-9abf87a41221" -force