SOBR questions

[Kazz]

Hi,

We currently have 25TB of veeam backups on a cifs datastore. We are keeping 30 days worth of restore points and have always been using reverse incremental backup. We are looking to add a SOBR on AWS, but only have 50Mb up link to the Internet. This means it would take us 50+ days to get full backups in to the capacity tier. To overcome this hurdle we are planning to use a snowball to get the data out to amazon.

Our goal is to keep 7 days or restore points locally and have anything older offloaded to AWS we also would like to keep a year worth of restore points in AWS. We are on Veeam 10.0

Looking at this video for 9.5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53-olTVl7Oc it sounds like we would have to change to forward incremental and periodically create full backups. If this is the case we are gonna break once we get to the point when we create a second full backup locally as uploading new full chain is not gonna be possible unless we up our internet.

Could anyone confirm our theory?

Thanks

[Adrian1980]

Hi Kazz,

you are right, you have to change to forward backup to use Amazon effective, because the concept of SOBR is to move out Fulls for archive purposes.
In your reverse goal, the Full will change every day and you never have the change to move it out, because this concpets are incompatible.

[HannesK]

Hello,
I just updated the object storage FAQ a few minutes ago to answer your questions

With reverse incremental all your VRB files are "inactive" (see FAQ). So a move is always possible.

The challenge is only the one full backup if you want to have a copy in AWS (which I recommend)

Keep in mind that only snowball edge is fully S3 compatible and the regular snowball is not supported because it has an incomplete S3 implementation.

Best regards,
Hannes

[Kazz]

Thanks for confirming.

I am also seeing an answer which indicates we only need to use the snowball once.

Q: Do I need to upload full backups regularly to object storage?
A: The copy or move process is incremental forever. Even if you do active full backup: only the changes will be uploaded to capacity tier. There is no need to upload full backups after the initial offload / copy.

Does copy immediately to SOBR option change anything or Veeam is only uploading changes to SOBR regardless of the options selected ?

[veremin]

Both move and copy policies are based on the same forward forever incremental approach. So, it does not change anything. Thanks!

[Kazz]

So looks like we just hit our 1st road block. In addition to forward incremental we have to have at least 2 fulls on local storage 1 in inactive chain and the 2nd in the active to meet our requirement of having 7 days worth of restores onsite.

We will be out of space on local storage if we have to have 2 fulls, I guess there is nothing can be done about this and we have to purchase an additional shelf for our storage?

Thanks

[veremin]

If there is a requirement to host two full backups on-prem, while on-prem storage is not capable of that, we cannot really help, indeed. So, buying additional storage looks like the best option. Thanks!

[Gostev]

Well, assuming CIFS share is backed by a NAS that supports iSCSI, there's in fact a better option: use ReFS or XFS for the backup repository volume. With that in place, the second synthetic full backup will not be taking any physical disk space.

[Kazz]

If there is a requirement to host two full backups on-prem, while on-prem storage is not capable of that, we cannot really help, indeed. So, buying additional storage looks like the best option. Thanks1

The requirement to have 2 full back ups on-prem is not mine. It's Veeams requirement for offload to SOBR

[Kazz]

Well, assuming CIFS share is backed by a NAS that supports iSCSI, there's in fact a better option: use ReFS or XFS for the backup repository volume. With that in place, the second synthetic full backup will not be taking any physical disk space.

Anton,

Thanks for chiming in this is a FC nas, the entire 25TB volume can presented to Veeam B&R server VM as a second drive, so I think I can reformat is as ReFS.

[Gostev]

Right, then this is the way to go for sure.

[Kazz]

A few more questions came up.

1. Is enabling encryption on the backup gonna have any affect on the storage savings we are gonna get with ReFS?
2. Would space savings be gained by running Synthetic full or Active full? Assuming it's the synthetic full that's gonna get us the space savings and not the active full.

Thanks

[Gostev]

1. Enabling encryption has no effect on block cloning.
2. You are correct, synthetic.

[HannesK]

It's Veeams requirement for offload to SOBR

nope... I stated that in my first post... for reverse incremental your old chain (except for the latest two incrementals) is eligible for offload.

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=100

[Kazz]

back to our requirement to have 7 days on prem and 365 days in sobr.

Is it only possible to configure with 365 day retention on the back job and 7 day offload setting on the SOBR repository?
Can I achieve the same result with GFS?

Thanks

[veremin]

Is it only possible to configure with 365 day retention on the back job and 7 day offload setting on the SOBR repository?

Correct.

Can I achieve the same result with GFS?

If you want to have daily backup for each day in the year, then, GFS will not cover these requirements.

Thanks!