Is it possible to make the capacity tier restore points larger than the local storage restore points?

[davidkillingsworth]

Veeam 11, latest patches

We have a setup where we have local backup storage and are keeping backups for 4 weeks.

We have an AWS S3 object storage repository with object locking configured as a scale out repository.

This seems to be working, but I never see the capacity storage grow and their AWS bills seem to be static.

In one way, this is awesome. We've never had a problem and we never see any increase in price, but I spent a few minutes tonight double checking that the restore points in the scale out repository are actually recent, which to my surprise actually were. I was getting worried that maybe I configured the thing wrong.

This is sort of working too well!!!

It made me consider whether we could increase the scale out repository restore points to 60 days and leave the local storage at 30 days.

Is this possible? If so, please point me to some documentation, tutorial video, or explain here.

Thanks.

[Mildur]

Hi David

Capacity tier is forever incremental. You won‘t have fullbackup or incremental backup files in the bucket. Veeam splits the backup files in blocks before offloading the data to the bucket. And from this blocks, only unique blocks are offloaded to the object storage. The same block will only stored once. It‘s similar to FastClone on refs or xfs.

So after 4 weeks, new unique blocks are offloaded, and the oldest unsused blocks are removed. If your production data doesn‘t grow, then your object storage won‘t growth either. The used storage will stay in the same range each month.

It made me consider whether we could increase the scale out repository restore points to 60 days and leave the local storage at 30 days.

Is this possible? If so, please point me to some documentation, tutorial video, or explain here.

Of course. Use Copy and Move mode at the same time.
Copy mode offloads the restore points as soon as they are created on the performance tier.
Move Mode will make sure, that after 30 days (operational restore window), the restore points (with inactive chains, you must use regular fullbackups) will be removed from performance tier. You can configure that in this step.
Also you must modify the retention of the backup/backup copy jobs to 60 days. The retention period for the restore points in the SOBR comes always from the job retention settings.

But consider, that your storage usage for the capacity tier will be higher. And so your monthly costs. 60 days of unique blocks will need more space instead of 30 days of unique blocks.
You can use veeam‘s calculator to get some idea how many storage you need on the capacity tier.

https://calculator.veeam.com/vbr

[davidkillingsworth]

Thanks for this reply. I found it very helpful.

I have decided to just increase the restore points in the backup job so that there are 45 days to keep things simple. I have enough local storage space for now to be able to do this.

One thing that caught my attention in your post was this part:

Capacity tier is forever incremental. You won‘t have fullbackup or incremental backup files in the bucket.

What happens if I am in a disaster recovery situation and I need to restore the latest backup from the scale out repository.

If my server room flooded for example, would I be able to buy a new server, install Veeam, configure everything, and then do a full restore of all VM guests in the backup job from the scale out repository?

[Mildur]

Hi David

Your welcome.

If my server room flooded for example, would I be able to buy a new server, install Veeam, configure everything, and then do a full restore of all VM guests in the backup job from the scale out repository?

Yes, of course.

Just install a vbr server, add back the object storage and import the backups.

Then you will be able to restore your vms. You can leverage instant vm recovery or restore the entire vm. Or you can restore Guest and Application Items if some data is needed, before restoring the entire infrastructure.

Even community edition will work for restoring your vms from object storage.

After the restore, new backups to the capacity tier will looks like new vms. All data will be offloaded again as a new Full Backup.
Make sure, that you use a new bucket for the new SOBR. You can‘t use the same bucket for the sobr if you have imported the backups from a bucket. After 45-50 days (Retention period and immutability is over), you can delete the old bucket.