Backup Copies to Amazon S3 Object Storage

[wocomike]

Hi All,

We've been using Veeam roughly 10 years now. The backup copy feature is great, as we send backup copies to a VM at an offsite datacenter nightly. The storage is presented as an SMB/CIFS file share. I'm concerned about ransomware or a sophisticated attack. We do take security precautions, such as the Veeam server is not on the domain, uses a different admin password, etc. But I know it's not foolproof.

Bear with me, as nearly everything we do is in-house, and I have very little knowledge of Amazon S3. But, what I would like to do is send backup copies to S3 with immutable storage.

Questions:

What storage tier should I buy, assuming I will send backup copies nightly, and will need capability to make them immutable?

Do I simply setup the object storage in Veeam, point it at S3, setup a SOBR, and then point my backup copy jobs to the SOBR?

Can I move my existing backup copies from the offsite datacenter to the S3 bucket?

Thanks in advance!

-Mike

[PetrM]

Hello,

1) Both standard and infrequent access (IA) storage classes are supported for Amazon S3.
2) Yes, you just add an object storage as capacity extent to the existing SOBR.
3) Backups can be offloaded to the Capacity Tier by Move or Copy policies. By the way in case of backup copy job, the Move policy can process only full backup files that have a GFS flag.

Thanks!

[Gostev]

While IA storage class is supported, it does not make economical sense for most scenarios around Copy policy and/or Immutable backups. Pretty much the only one good use case for it is Move policy with the offload window configured to only process GFS backups. This is explained directly in the user interface where you enable the usage of this storage class though.

nearly everything we do is in-house

In this case, may be consider V11 Hardened Repository instead of cloud object storage?

The latter is a great choice for those without a second off-site data center, but it sounds like you do have one. So the only other reason to use immutable backups in Amazon S3 would be implementation of the Zero Trust model (when you want to protect also against malicious sysadmins on staff). But this requires so many other pieces of a puzzle addressed in the environment besides backup... doing it just for backups hardly moves the needle.