GFS Retention with SOBR Capacity Tier

[mogan2055847]

Hi,

Need some help here to ensure I'm doing the correct thing:

Requirement & Policy:
Daily retention: 7 days (on both performance tier & capacity tier)
GFS Month retention: 12 months (only on performance tier, is this possible? Else, we can change our plan to capacity tier)
GFS Year Retention: 10 years (only on capacity tier)

On SOBR:
- Copy mode enable
- Move backup files older than: 365 days

Is above setting looks ok? Can we accomplish via a single policy ? Or have to create multiple policy?

Also question on the "GFS Month retention: 12 months", will the GFS monthly backup file size equal to full backup size, or only the first monthly full is full size, remaining 11 is like incremental file size? Same go to the GFS yearly backup file size over 10 years.


Thank you in advance.

[Mildur]

Hi Mogansundram

With copy mode enabled, each restore point which gets created on performance tier will also be offloaded directly to the capacity tier. After 365 days, they will be removed from the performance tier.

This configuration doesn’t work for your goal. You can‘t keep 12 monthlies only on the performance tier, if you have enabled copy policy. They will instantly be copied to the capacity tier after their creation.
Do you have configured weekly fullbackup or just monthly ones? Without regular weekly fulls, you won‘t have just 7-14 daily backups, you will have 30-60 daily backups on both tiers. That‘s because your backup chains will have a size of one full and 29-30 incremental backups.

My recommendation, use copy mode and set the move mode to 7-14 days. If you use AWS or Azure, you can also offload the yearly backups to archive object storage to save money.

will the GFS monthly backup file size equal to full backup size, or only the first monthly full is full size, remaining 11 is like incremental file size? Same go to the GFS yearly backup file size over 10 years.

Object storage behaves like a forever forward incremental chain. Meaning the first offload will be a full offload. After that, only new unique blocks will be offloaded. This is also valid for synthetic/active backups and for gfs restore points. You won‘t see 22 times the size of a fullbackup in the capacity tier.

Thanks
Fabian

[mogan2055847]

Good day Fabian,

Thank you for your explanation, we got clearer picture and kind of understanding on how the copy & move works now. With that, we are thinking keep only 3 monthly on the performance tier and 12 monthly in the capacity tier, this will help us minimize the performance tier storage size:

Daily retention: 7 days (on both performance tier & capacity tier)
GFS Month retention: 3 monthly (performance tier) , 12 months (capacity tier)
GFS Year Retention: 10 years (only on capacity tier)

To ensure we don't loss any restore point, will below setting achieve our goal?

In Backup job:
Backup job retention: 7 days with weekly Synthetic full on Sat.
GFS Month retention: 12 months
GFS Year Retention: 10 years

On SOBR:
- Copy mode enable
- Move mode enable with move backup files older than: 7 days ( We are a bit confuse about this flag, will this help us keep 3 monthly on the performance tier or only 2 monthly?)


Thank you in advance.

[Mildur]

Hi Mogansundram

Settings looks good now for your goal. Just one small change is neccessary.

- Move mode enable with move backup files older than: 7 days ( We are a bit confuse about this flag, will this help us keep 3 monthly on the performance tier or only 2 monthly?)

With the operational restores window setting you configure the time period, after the inactive backup chains will be removed from performance tier and moved to the capacity tier if not already happened through the copy mode.

Now, If you want to keep 3 monthly backups on the performance tier, then please configure this value to 91-98 days. If you configure 7 days, monthly gfs backups will be removed from performance tier 7-14 days after they were created.

Thanks
Fabian