Question on Migration of LTR and S3

[jimnoco]

Greetings,

My company, as a service provider, is in the process of decommissioning a legacy backup system (Avamar) and moving all customers to Veeam. We have a challenge with one customer who has quite sizeable long term retention in Avamar. It appears there is no way to migrate this data into Veeam so we are trying to come up with a solution to retain the customer's LTR since the Avamar hardware itself is going end of life. Our main concern is the monthly and yearly retentions as they have a few years to be maintained for both.

Our plan (and it sucks) is to over time, have one of our guys routinely conduct restores of the vm's old states from the Avamar system to a staging environment. From there we would take a one time full backup of that vm state with Veeam so that it is in line with the retention set by the customer. Of course we'd have to do this many times per the actual restore points that are needed. We would then want to take those one time fulls and immediately archive them off to our s3 platform.

My question is twofold. First just looking for any feedback on what might be a faster easier approach to this process. We could maintain the Avamar hardware until its needed but this is a last resort. Secondly is regarding the offload to S3. I've done quite a bit of reading on capacity tier and we use it in some of our environments. We essentially don't want to keep any of this on our performance tier. Would we need to manually move each full backup file off to S3 once it is completed? Or would it work if we created a SOBR specifically for these and just instruct the offload to "Move backup files older than 0 days" so that it automatically gets archived off?

Thanks in advance for any feedback,
Jimmy

[Gostev]

Hi, Jimmy

My only idea to make it faster (and reduce costs) is to script everything. Doing this manually has got to be super expensive from the salary perspective of your guys. You should see if you can script Avamar restores, as with Veeam everything is scriptable for sure.

Yes, the dedicated SOBR for this makes sense. Note that it can use the same on-prem storage hardware as your "normal" SOBR, just a different folder. Keep in mind that active (latest) backup chain cannot be offloaded, so even if you set 0 days, it won't be until the following full is created that the previous full is offloaded.

Thanks!

[jimnoco]

Hi Gostev,

Thanks for your feedback. That was what I was worried about regarding the latest active backup chain. Since it would just be a one time full taken, there would be no subsequent backups so I'm assuming these would need to be moved manually then?

[Gostev]

I guess I misunderstood your plan then. If you're planning to be creating one-off backups with VeeamZIP, then you're better of waiting for v11, as v10 can only offload backups which are created by regular backup jobs.