We're on 11a and backup ESXi VMs. Our Veeam server is a physical host with local storage. Our backups are incremental daily and a full month end backup, we split the jobs into groups of servers based on role, so all web servers together, all DCs together, all app servers together etc. and our single file server by itself.
The retention period for most jobs is 180 days (6 months) and we backup to a SOBR Repository (Azure Blob) which is set to move backups to the cloud after 31 days. My understanding is that I can get anything back "quickly" within 31 days as it's local, and anything older than that I can pull back from Azure. I also have backup copy jobs setup that copy the backups offsite immediately and finally I have replication jobs setup that replicate certain critical servers to our DR site so that they're ready to go at a moments notice. Last but not least I have tape backups that run immediately after the monthly full backups and put those full backups on tapes which are then taken away offsite.
The problem with SOBR is that my file server (and mail servers) is large and takes up a huge amount of backup space on the VEEAM server so my retention period is only a few days. This is a problem as you can see for a few reasons. 1) I can't go back too far for restores; and 2) it never reaches the 31 day age that means it'll get moved to the Azure Blob Storage. I'd like to keep my file server backups for a few months in Azure at least.
GFS isn't enabled anywhere
I guess I am asking a few different things here:
1) Incremental Daily, Full monthly. Is that ok? Should I be doing Synthetic fulls?
2) Storage Level corruption guard (aka healthchecks) - Should I enable these on all jobs? Is there a performance hit and how often should I do them? Right now they're not enabled and I thought that since the storage is local that I didn't need them, however, rather safe than sorry.
3) Most importantly - How can I get my file server backups to keep more restore points without filling up my local storage. The three options I see are: a) Enable GFS and tell it to keep monthly backups for 6 months, would those GFS backups immediately go to Azure as it's outside of the 31 days as set in the SOBR?; and b) Use the "Copy backups to object storage as soon as they are created" in the SOBR ;or c) Purchase more local storage, sadly that isn't too easy at the moment as we run RAID 6 and the server is full so it'd be a case of replacing all the disks, a very expensive process, however if you tell me that it's the only way to do it, then I'll persevere with finance
Apologies as a "quick quesion" because quite in depth!