Month-End Backup Job Scheduling

[jtatum]

SOFTWARE/EQUIPMENT
Veeam Backup & Replication 7
VMWare vSphere Essentials Plus
iOmega NAS (2 x 1GB Load Balancing NICs) (5.5TB Usable)

GOAL
I'm trying to schedule a backup job within Veeam to perform our month-end backups to our iOmega NAS device. I have created folders on the device for each quarter (Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4). I have also created backup repositories for each quarter as well as a backup job for each quarter. The idea being that for January an active full backup would take place, then for the end of February and March only incremental backups would take place. There are roughly 14 VMs included in these jobs. The total size of an active full job is roughly 1TB compressed and I'm unsure at the moment as to what size an incremental at the end of the month would be.

CURRENT CONFIGURATION
So for the backup job (EOM Q1), I have set the retention policy to "4". Under "Advanced Settings" I have chosen "Incremental" without synthetic fulls for "Backup mode", then I chose "Perform active full backups periodically --> Monthly on: Last Saturday" --> Choose a month at random because I don't plan on this deploying automatically. Also, CBT is turned on. I plan to manually start the job at the end of each month. Then of course, when the 1st quarter is completed, then I'll move to the next backup job (EOM Q2).

So this would give me a total of 4 active full backups with 8 incremental backups.
JOB (EOM Q1): January (Active Full) --> February (Incremental) --> March (Incremental)
JOB (EOM Q2): April (Active Full) --> May (Incremental) --> June (Incremental)
JOB (EOM Q3): July (Active Full) --> August (Incremental) --> September (Incremental)
JOB (EOM Q4): October (Active Full) --> November (Incremental) --> December (Incremental)

CONCERNS/QUESTIONS
Is this the ideal way for scheduling month-end backups within Veeam? I know ideally we'd want to have full backups for each month end, but unfortunately we don't have a 12TB NAS to do so. As mentioned above, our active full backups total roughly 1TB and our NAS has a total of 5.5TB usable space.

Would there be issues with waiting so long between doing incremental backups? (Other than duration of the job) Although the incremental job would take longer than ones that were set to daily, essentially it would still be faster than doing an active full, correct?


Thanks in advance for any help.

[foggy]

Justin, why don't you want to use just a single job for this kind of backup policy and schedule it to run automatically each month, instead of triggering it each time manually? Unless there are some reasons (that you haven't specified in your post) for going with different jobs writing to different repositories, you could just use one forward incremental job with 12 restore points retention. This will allow to save space comparing to several jobs scenario, as you would need to store just a single full per year. You could also schedule quarterly active fulls, if required.

Note: if you need to run backup on the last day of each month, you should schedule it via Task Manager, as currently the job scheduler allows to select particular week days only.

Btw, how long do you need to keep those monthly backups? What about the next year's backups, will they go to the same NAS? Are you planning to clean it up at the end of the year, offloading backup files somewhere else?

Would there be issues with waiting so long between doing incremental backups? (Other than duration of the job) Although the incremental job would take longer than ones that were set to daily, essentially it would still be faster than doing an active full, correct?

That is the right question, indeed. However since you do not know the amount of monthly changes at the moment, no one can answer it confidently.

Also, do you have any daily backups for these VMs and just need monthly backups for longer-term archiving? In this case you could consider using backup copy jobs instead.

[jtatum]

Foggy, thanks for the response.

I chose to have it as a manual process, because I would be running the backups after we have posted inventory/costing changes into our system at month-end. Our DBA finishes this at different times, and we also wanted to make sure that it was an actual month-end backup, as opposed to a particular weekday closest to month-end (which would be resolved by utilizing Task Manager as you suggested). However, I'm still at the point of having to wait on my DBA to finish posting necessary changes before we do our full backups.

I separated the jobs into 4 different jobs just for the sake of having a full backup to resort back to in case of corruption with one of the other full backups.

We would also need to keep backups on-hand for 1 year. Doing separate backup jobs would also allow me to delete the 1st quarter backups by the time we were ready for the following year's 1st quarter backups (which would obviously delete the next two months as well). However, if the space savings by combining the jobs into one job is significant, and there are no issues with having only 1 active full with the 11 incremental backups, then I wouldn't mind doing that to save space and save room for next year's backups.

Right now our nightly incremental backups are a total of roughly 37GB compressed. How this would compare to a monthly incremental remains unknown.

Thoughts? Thanks again for the response.

[foggy]

However, I'm still at the point of having to wait on my DBA to finish posting necessary changes before we do our full backups.

Got it.

I separated the jobs into 4 different jobs just for the sake of having a full backup to resort back to in case of corruption with one of the other full backups.

This is in fact the same as scheduling quarterly active fulls within the single backup job I was suggesting above, as those active fulls will be completely independent (each made from scratch by reading full VM data).

We would also need to keep backups on-hand for 1 year. Doing separate backup jobs would also allow me to delete the 1st quarter backups by the time we were ready for the following year's 1st quarter backups (which would obviously delete the next two months as well).

Setting retention to 9 keep restore points will do this automatically for you at the end of each quarter's backup (once you get the 4th quarter's 3 monthly restore points created, the job will remove the 1st quarter's backups, cleaning up the space for the next quarter). But I would still set it to 12 to always have backups for the entire year, if that is your requirement (however, space issue).

However, if the space savings by combining the jobs into one job is significant, and there are no issues with having only 1 active full with the 11 incremental backups, then I wouldn't mind doing that to save space and save room for next year's backups.

12 increments backup chain is not considered to be very long, according to the recommendations on the full backup frequency for daily backups.

Right now our nightly incremental backups are a total of roughly 37GB compressed. How this would compare to a monthly incremental remains unknown.

You could take 37*30 as a rough upper bound estimate, I suppose. However, if approximately the same data is changed each day, the final amount of changed data after a month will be much less.

[jtatum]

So, here's my configurations for gathering month-end backups.

I decided to remove my archived files/folders from the month-end backups, which is roughly 500GB. All other servers will be backed up in the regular end-of-month backup job.

Job Name: End-of-Month Job
Number of VMs: 14
Size Estimate: 600GB Compressed
Backup Repository: "EOM" Directory on the iomega NAS.
Retention Policy: 12
Backup Mode: Incremental w/o Synthetic Fulls
Active Full Backup: Perform active full backups periodically --> Monthly (First Sunday, January)
*NOTE: I set the "Active Full Backup" to only one month, because I have no intention to let it do it. I'll change it as the next year comes around.

At the end of each month, I will manually run the necessary task (coordinating with the schedule I posted earlier).

QUESTION:
If I click on the job and select "Active Full", then the "Active Full" will run, but what happens when I select "Start" on the backup job. Does this perform an incremental?

[Vitaliy S.]

If I click on the job and select "Active Full", then the "Active Full" will run, but what happens when I select "Start" on the backup job. Does this perform an incremental?

Correct, if this is not the first job run, then it would perform an incremental pass once you click a "Start" button.

[veremin]

Does this perform an incremental?

Quick remark. If this day is scheduled for active/synthetic full backup, then, the full backup will be performed. Otherwise, the incremental pass will be performed.

Thanks.

[jtatum]

Thanks to everyone for the replies and suggestions. All were extremely helpful in creating a solution. I ran January's active full backup this past weekend. The plan for February is to run an incremental and assess the size of the backup to see if it makes sense to do 11 incremental backups or 4 active fulls w/ 8 incrementals.

Thanks again.

[foggy]

You're welcome. Feel free to ask for any additional clarifications, if required.