Keep as many backups as possible with rotated drives?

[mvalpreda]

Veeam 8.0u1 on Hyper-V 2008 R2.

Trying to figure out the best way to backup to rotated drives. Currently we have 3x3TB drives rotated out every Friday. That part works great. New drive is plugged in, there is a new backup chain started. Doing 1 backup a day at 10pm and using incremental. Problem I am having is that I want to keep as many backups as possible. As soon as I plug in the #1 drive again, it deletes the backup chain on that drive. I don't want to do that.

What settings do I want to keep as many backups as possible? Is there a way to mark a backup chain as "never delete"? I had media rules in Backup Exec that would keep certain sets forever. Trying to do something similar.

Thanks for any input!

[Gostev]

Hi, you should increase the Restore points to keep value in the backup job to large amount. Veeam v8 will only delete backup files that are no longer under retention policy. Thanks!

[mvalpreda]

So where it says 14 by default, change that to something higher?

Is there a way to make an 'End of Month' backup never delete? Or would that be a different job?

[foggy]

So where it says 14 by default, change that to something higher?

Correct. Am I understanding right, that currently it cleans up the entire drive? Could you please check whether the registry keys enabling rotated drives scenario in previous versions are specified?

Is there a way to make an 'End of Month' backup never delete? Or would that be a different job?

You can achieve this with backup copy GFS retention.

[mvalpreda]

I'll check the registry keys a bit later, but this machine has only had Veeam 8.

I understand the GFS scheme, but how do I configure that with Veeam? Is this done with multiple jobs?

[foggy]

This is done within a single backup copy job.

[mvalpreda]

BOOM! I think that is exactly what I am looking for. The archival jobs will rotate down and delete as new weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly as time goes on? So if I had 5 weeklys, it would always have the latest 5 weeklys? Or If I had 6 months, it would have the latest 6 months?

[foggy]

Exactly.

[mvalpreda]

On the backup copy job, do I want to do that daily? Or just once a week?

Also, I don't have the option to pick a tick in 'Keep the following restore points for archive purposes.' Do I need to have another drive to do this?

[foggy]

On the backup copy job, do I want to do that daily? Or just once a week?

It's up to you. Depends on what exactly do you want to archive (weekly, monthly, etc) and whether you want to keep all those restore points as separate fulls (or you're ok with weeklies in the form of incremental chain).

Also, I don't have the option to pick a tick in 'Keep the following restore points for archive purposes.' Do I need to have another drive to do this?

Mm.. do you mean the check box is greyed out?

[mvalpreda]

Correct. The check box is greyed out.

[foggy]

Not sure I've ever seen this behavior. Please contact technical support to take a look at this.

[mvalpreda]

Boils down to you cannot do GFS with rotated drives.

[foggy]

Somehow I missed this fact, my bad. Sorry for confusion. GFS is not applicable to rotated drives scenario.

You can either use several backup copy jobs (by the number of rotated drives, just make sure the appropriate drive is inserted each time) or use some local staging repository to point GFS backup copy job to and then copy GFS backups to rotated drives via some external copying tool, such as Rsync or similar.