Best practise for GFS style Backup

[Ara]

Hi,

I'm in the process of setting up the backup of our Hyper-V 2012 Cluster.
I want to retain the Backups in a Grandfather-Father-Son Style, for example 30 daily, 6 monthly and 2 yearly Backups.

What is the best way to set this up?
I guess I need at least 2 Jobs: 1 Backup + 1 Copy Job, right?
So the Backup Job would for example run every 2 hours, and have 30 restore points. And then the Copy Job with the desired retention times.
What are the recommended settings, especially regarding incremental method etc.?

VMs to backup are Exchange 2010, MS SQL Server, Sharepoint, RDS and various other application servers.

Thanks in advance,
Christian

[veremin]

I guess I need at least 2 Jobs: 1 Backup + 1 Copy Job, right?

Correct.

What are the recommended settings, especially regarding incremental method etc.?

The backup mode of source backup job doesn't matter, because the backup copy job doesn't copy backup file as a whole, but rather synthetically creates required restore points in "target" location from VM data in source backup repositories.

Given your GFS requirements, I believe the following combination of settings of backup copy job will work for you:

- Copy every : 1 Day
- Restore points to keep: 30
- Monthly backup: 30
- Yearly backup: 2

Thanks.