Synthetic Full Backup Time

Some user confusion has arisen when looking at the status of individual Virtual Machine (VM) backups after a Virtual Server Agent (VSA) synthetic full job. The backup times listed for each VM are not updated by a synthetic full job. The times shown are those of the last non-full backup job and are correct.

A synthetic full job is often confused with a backup job since the action to initiate one is the same as other backup job types. However, it is not a backup job in the true sense since it does not pull data from the client source. Rather, it uses data already existing on backup media.

As such, the Virtual Machine status you see accurately reports the last time data from the virtual machine was read and backed up.  Nominally, an incremental backup job is scheduled in conjunction with a synthetic full job in order to provide actual data protection.