Synthetic Backups are also known as Advanced Incremental Backups. Several Advanced Incremental backups are done, backing up to a File Library, a Consolidation is done of several Advanced Incremental backups into a Synthetic Full Backup, then Object Copy is used to send that to tape, if so desired
From this, I can determine that these licenses are needed
- Single Drive
- Advanced Backup to disk
You probably already have one or more SIngle Drive licenses, but, may not have Advanced Backup to disk. These come in flavors of 1TB, 10TB, and 100TB
You may be able to make this work if you have a VTL that emulates a tape library, and a sufficient number of Single Drive licenses, but the documentation says:
Synthetic backup is an advanced backup solution that eliminates the need to run regular full backups. After an initial full backup, only incremental backups are run, and subsequently merged with the full backup into a new, synthetic full backup. This can be repeated indefinitely, with no need to run a full backup again. In terms of restore speed, such a backup is equivalent to a conventional full backup.
How to perform synthetic backup
The synthetic backup procedure consists of the following steps:
In the backup specification that is used for the full backup and incremental backups, enable the Enhanced incremental backup option.
Perform a full backup.
Configure subsequent incremental backups to be written to one file library.
When at least one incremental backup exists, perform object consolidation. How frequently you perform object consolidation depends on your backup strategy.