How to use immutable S3 for offsite, not capacity

[dpbss]

We recently setup VBR 10 to backup 4 VMs and about 2TB to an onsite ReFS repository (20TB, RAID 10). For offsite we have been using a backup copy job to USB disks, but have always planned to move to S3 compatible for offsite.

Immutable S3 seems perfect for this, but all the documentation and examples point to doing this via a SOBR with S3 in the capacity tier (and we've found posts here saying that this is the only option.) But we don't want to use S3 for capacity, or pay to keep a copy of the entire 20TB repository in the cloud. We just want an immutable short chain offsite in case of "disaster".

Will we be able to setup a backup copy job to an immutable S3 repository, or is there another way to accomplish this?

[Gostev]

Since the retention policy is defined on the job itself, the only way to accomplish this currently is to do a Backup Copy job with the required short retention policy to a dedicated SOBR with the Copy mode enabled. Needless to say, this other SOBR can share the same physical storage with the primary SOBR (just a different folder).

[dpbss]

Thanks, that makes sense. We'll give it a try.

[dpbss]

This is working (though the initial cloud offload still has a long way to go.)

The one surprise was that the Backup Copy job to the SOBR performance tier, despite being stored on the same ReFS volume as the source backups it was created from, did not use Fast Clone. We had assumed the on-site SOBR backups would be nearly cost-free in terms of storage, but it seems we assumed wrong.

Is there a reason that Fast Clones can't be used Backup Copy jobs (to the same ReFS volume), or did we miss a configuration step, or has it just not yet been implemented in v10?

[Gostev]

Fast cloning shares blocks within the given backup chains only. It does not work as "global dedupe", if that's what you expected... at least not currently.