retention costs for azure object storage

[mcbadon48]

Hello,

I’m looking for some advice on object storage / local backups retention settings, and best practices to keep data from getting corrupted.

In my organization any VM backups over a few weeks old are useless to us. Combined full backup size of all vms is 10TB. Daily backups run M-F. We have plenty of internet bandwidth to get the full backup uploaded quickly to azure.

Right now we are doing forever forward. The weekly health checks are taking around 24 hours to complete and often end up failing. We are not currently uploading anything to Azure but would like to start soon. I’m thinking about doing weekly or biweekly active fulls to avoid using the health check feature. But open to suggestions.

We are looking to keep cloud storage costs as low as possible. I’ve read that the lowest tier Veeam allows daily backups to be sent to is the cool storage option. I’m worried about the early deletion fees since I want to keep as little data as possible in azure.

What do you think is the best retention and full backup schedule or health check settings for us from a cost / best practice perspective. We will be copying backups to azure as soon as they are created.

I was thinking there are 3 options but I may be wrong:

1. Monthly active full backup with 1 restore point so at the beginning of each azure billing cycle the previous full backup and 20 restore points get deleted. (I’ve heard 15 or less restore points is the sweet spot but that may only apply to forever forward).

2. Biweekly active full backup with 10 restore points so there are always 2 fulls and 20 restore points in azure and the oldest one gets dumped at beginning of azure billing cycle.

3. Forever forward with weekly health checks and quarterly active fulls to reduce chances of corruption.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thank you,

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums.

The weekly health checks are taking around 24 hours to complete and often end up failing

I guess because the new backup starts before the health check finishes, or why do they fail? Are you on V12?

I’m thinking about doing weekly or biweekly active fulls to avoid using the health check feature. But open to suggestions.

I would fix the health check problem instead of spending money on cloud providers

We are looking to keep cloud storage costs as low as possible.

no active full and hot tier (because you said, that backups older a few weeks are useless for you. so I assume that you have a retention of only a few weeks)

1. No active full, but yes, you can do backup copy jobs to Azure
2. that's even more expensive than 1
3. No active fulls, but you can enable health checks if you like

I mean, Azure has 11 nines... so chances are pretty low to have an issue.

Best regards,
Hannes