Question on using SOBR

[cnyengineer]

I have very limited on site storage and was wondering if I could use SOBR with B2 as basically just a staging point for offloading backups to B2.

For instance, right now we can only keep 7 days of our most important database backed up. There are long term things I need to convince everyone of to fix this, but for now, I'm trying to get up to 6 months of cloud storage for full backups in the form of 6 monthly fulls.

I was thinking of creating a SOBR where it runs a single full backup per month then immediately moves it from the performance tier to the capacity tier, set to 6 month retention. Would that work? Basically, I want to keep 6 months worth of backups for this database up in B2 but can't afford to have more than 1 copy of it stores locally.

Is this possible?

Thanks

[oleg.feoktistov]

Hi @cnyengineer and Welcome to the Community Forums!

I was thinking of creating a SOBR where it runs a single full backup per month then immediately moves it from the performance tier to the capacity tier, set to 6 month retention.

Are you thinking to keep a single full backup of your database locally at all in scope of backup job or just in scope of backup copy job targeted to SOBR?

Thanks,
Oleg

[cnyengineer]

The way we currently have it is that we keep 7 days of backups with a synthetic full once a week. I'd like to keep that in place. I just also want a backup up in B2 as well, and to have that backup age out after 6 months. So two total full backups. One local and one in the cloud, unless there is a better way to do it. I am new to this and am trying to figure out the best way to go about it with the resources I have.

[oleg.feoktistov]

If you have VBR v10:
- Create SOBR and configure Capacity Tier's operational restore window to > 10-12 days.
- Enable monthly GFS in your primary backup job, set its retention to 6 months and select SOBR as a target storage.

Once you configure all above, full from the first week will be assigned with a monthly GFS flag and put aside before short-term retention hits. When operational restore window exceeds, it will be offloaded to object storage.
In such way, 7 days of backups will stay on performance extent and only one marked as monthly - offloaded to capacity.
To be sure, you can monitor GFS candidates with the powershell script below:

Code: Select all

$backup = Get-VBRBackup -Name 'BACKUP-TO-SOBR'
$restorepoints = Get-VBRRestorePoint -Backup $backup
$objects = $backup.GetGfsCandidateStorageGroups($restorepoints[0].Id)
foreach($object in $objects) {
    $object.Candidates | select StorageFileName, Flags, CreationTimeUTC
} 

Cheers!

[cnyengineer]

Wow, thanks for the help! I'll give this a shot for sure.

[cnyengineer]

Just to be sure I'm clear, I'd like to describe the steps I've taken to verify they're correct:

Created a new local storage repository for use with the SOBR.
Created a new object storage repository for use with the SOBR.
Created a new SOBR and on the 'Capacity Tier' page I've chosen to 'Extend scale-out backup...' and selected by object storage repo, then also checked 'Move backups to object storage as they...' and set the 'Move backup files older than' selector to '12'.

Then, for testing, I'm going to create a new job, and on the Storage page I'll choose my SOBR as the repo, set the retention policy for 7 days, check 'Keep certain full backups longer...' and configure it by checking 'Keep monthly full backups for' then choose '6' months.

That should do it?

EDIT: Also, if I run that script and the 'Flags' column reads 'Monthly' that indicates it's been flagged as the backup to be saved for monthly GFS retention?

[oleg.feoktistov]

Yes, that should be it. Also, make sure full backups are scheduled.
Keep in mind though that GFS retention does not apply to reverse incremental chains.

Also, if I run that script and the 'Flags' column reads 'Monthly' that indicates it's been flagged as the backup to be saved for monthly GFS retention?

Correct. And if it reads 'None', flag is not yet assigned but this backup is a candidate for assignment.
Thanks!