Backup Copy Job and Restore Points

[LMS]

Hi

We are new to Veeam and looking for a better understanding with backup copy restore points.

We have 2 options with Backup job as mentioned below
a) Full backup on every 2 weeks + daily incremental, mentioned 7 restore points, so we will get at least 14 restore points (1 Full backup + 13 incremental). We selected Perform Backup files health check every week just to confirm the full + incremental are healthy (hope this is required?)

Or
b) We will go with Reverse incremental with 14 restore points, but because of high I/O we prefer to go with option a.

What do you recommends here from your experience

Second one on Backup Copy Job. We need 30 restore points with Backup Copy Repository. We read and understood Backup Copy job always contains only one active incremental backup chain. So how can we schedule a job here with above option a backup job? We plan to go with below option, but not sure how it works

Create Backup copy with 30 restore points and create one monthly backup with 1 restore point. Here our understanding is once the 30 restore pints are over the Backup copy job creates a new Full + incremental backup chain. Also one Monthly full job would be available always throughout the year, Is this right and the proper way to configure Backup Copy jobs?

Thanks in advance

[Shestakov]

Hi,
We consider forever forward increment method for backup job + Surebackup to verify recoverability as the best practice.
In this case you will always have only 1 full backup and exact chosen number of increments. And you don`t need to perform full backups weekly.
As for backup copy, I would go for GFS retention policy to have historical monthly full backups. You can set daily retention=30 for your DR site as well.
Thanks!

[LMS]

Hi

We have around 50 TB X 2 storage in Main site (1 for Backup Job & another for Backup Copy), no storage level de-duplication, using inline de-duplication. Current backup strategy is forever forward incremental, what I understood from your reply is once we reach the restore points with forever forward incremental, VBR creates a new Full backup + incremental chain for specified restore point and delete the old chain, Am I right? Our intention is to take Active full backup atleast once in every 2 weeks to make sure we have exactly the same copy of VM (even though sureback is there) and to keep storage utilization effective & minimal

We started using VBR since past 2 months and the jobs / data utilizing almost all storage, that's why we plan to reschedule all jobs. We are using SureBackups for most of the VMs, but for clustered VMs using crash-consistent since can't use SureBackup.

We are not sure on how Backup copy works, it states there is only one chain always available. Suppose if we need 30 restore points and configured to run continuously from the backup job which runs with full backup every 2 weeks + incremental. So with a 30 restore points Backup copy job how it behaves on below

-> once reach 30 restore points what will happen to Full + Incremental chain
-> If we always need previous month backup. GFS with one Monthly backup is enough?

Thank in advance

[Shestakov]

what I understood from your reply is once we reach the restore points with forever forward incremental, VBR creates a new Full backup + incremental chain for specified restore point and delete the old chain, Am I right?

No, new chain will not appear. Forever forward incremental method keep using only one chain. Please check the hyperlink.
Backup copy job by default uses forever forward incremental backup method. Think of it how of reverse incremental chain, but with full backup in the beginning, not end of the chain.
If you want to keep on secondary repository last 30 restore points, just set retention=30 with no GFS retention.
Thanks!

[LMS]

Sorry still hard to understand, in theory I understood how FFI, RI, Active Full etc are working. But in practical it's hard to achieve what we are looking for mainly because of storage limitation. Keeping below in mind, can you please suggest a policy

a) As per Audit requirements we need to perform an Active Full backup at least once in every 2 weeks
b) Sure Backups would be configured for non clustered VMs, for clustered VMs it's crash consistent backup
c) Restore Points must be minimum of 14 days with Backup job and 30 days with Backup Copy jobs (Once Tape Library is available will configure GFS retention)
d) We have to keep in mind storage size limitation while configure the restore points

Here are the considerations, please let us know whether it's valid make some sense

2 Jobs will be scheduled for each VM
-> 1st Backup job will be configured as Forever Forward Incremental with 14 Restore Points, no Backup copy job would be configured for this backup
-> 2nd job would be configured with Weekly Active Full + Daily incremental with 1 restore point (so always there will be one copy in Primary Repository)
Backup copy job will be configured with 30 restore points (we believe Backup copy is a forever forward incremental job)

What do you think on this job schedule? Also Sure Backup would be configured for 1st and 2nd Backup job (for non clustered VMs), believe no need to run sure backup for backup copy job

Thanks in advance

[sg_sc]

Do not use a job for each VM, put VM's together in 1 job to get some Veeam deduplication benefits.
Forever Forward Incremental is (just as Reverse Incremental) the best for storage space utilisation.

I understand you need active fulls, so FFI or RI is not an option. So how about a primary job with 13 (not 14!) restore points retention and weekly active full.
At most your prim. storage will then contain 3 full VBK's, the oldest VBK won't be deleted until all the incremental VIB's behind it are expired (retention) but this will be the day before the 4th VBK gets created, so it will be max. 3 full VBK's at all times.
With your 2 job setup you will have the same amount of full VBK's as far I can tell, they will just be spread out over 2 jobs.

Backup copy job is simple FFI and doesn't care what kind of job type the prim job is. Set up GFS if you need to keep weekly, monthly, quarterly of yearly fulls.

[LMS]

Thank You sg

Actually we considered what you mentioned, but as you mentioned it contains 3 full VBK, but the one we mentioned contains only 2 full VBKs at a time.

For de duplication I have updated the other forum (microsoft-hyper-v-f25/how-de-duplicatio ... 43265.html)