Help setting up GFS backup structure

[rimrock]

Hello all,

I am trying to setup a GFS structure for a client and am looking to have a structure like the following:

1.) Daily Backup with 30 Restore Points
2.) Weekly Backups up to 12 weeks
3.) Monthly Backups up to 6 months

I have read a lot of the documentation but I having trouble putting it all together.

I was thinking I would probably need 1 Regular backup with Synthetics and then 1 Backup-Copy job to perform the GFS cycle for Monthly and Weekly. I am just not sure of the settings to use.

My repo is using ReFS so it supports Fast Cloning.

Any assistance would be very helpful!

Thank you in advance,

Nick Massin

[PetrM]

Hi Nick! Welcome to our forum! The setup described seems to be valid, Fast Clone increases speed of synthetic operations including creation of GFS backups and merge of backup files. I'd recommend to use forever forward incremental chain for primary backup job if you run backup job every day and would like to have 30 backup restore points. One more thing to keep in mind about GFS backup copy is a possible concurrent archive schedule: if you schedule Weekly and Monthly on the same day only one archive full backup will be created and will have both monthly and weekly GFS flags.
Thanks!

[rimrock]

Thank you very much Peter! glad to be on board to Veeam train.

I really appreciate you thoughts, so a few questions:

1.) In performing the forever forward incremental chain I am effectively removing the Synthetic backups correct?

2.) I was hoping to get some guidance on how to configure the Backup-Copy job in terms of
a.) Copy interval, When the backup copies are made. I currently have the Weekly set to 7 Day
b.) Restore points to keep? This is one I am a bit confused on
c.) Whether I should read of source or not?

3.) With ReFS do I need to perform maintenance and dedupe? Storage-level corruption guard?

Keeping in mid I want to keep 12 Weeklys and 6 months of Monthlys

Any help would be amazing,

Cheers,

Nick

[foggy]

1. Yes.
2.
a) If you don't need dailies on target, copy interval set to 7 days is ok.
b) This is the number of restore points in the "regular" part of the chain. Since you have a weekly interval and need only GFS, it doesn't really matter what you set here, so typically it is set to a minimum of 2 restore points.
c) This is whether all the data to build a new GFS full is read from source or the file is synthesized on target. Since you have ReFS, synthetics will be fast and spaceless, so no need to enable this check box.

3. There's no need for maintenance in case of ReFS and FastClone cannot be used with Windows deduplication. Corruption guard wouldn't harm.