We need to keep weekly backups for 2 months and monthly backups for 1 year. Monthly is straight forward because we're not dealing with increments, however we need to have those weekly backups + increments.
So I was thinking of having 1 weekly full backup synthesized on tape once a month (first week) then the other weeks, just have the increments offloaded to tape. Also, would "as backup files appear" work in this scenario? It would be useful since we would be able to offload increments all week and send them offsite on Fridays
I have daily backups set to 14 restore points that we keep on disk.
I'm not sure where to start to configure these. Any help would be appreciated.
Could you clarify your goal please?
Besides monthly backups, do you wish to have only weekly backups on your tape(~9 backups for 2 months) or weekly + daily backups(~61 backups)? If you want only weeklies only, do you want to have them all as Full backups or 1 Full + 8 Increments?
Thanks!
Only weeklies (1 Full + 8 increments). We're currently using Forever forward incremental because we don't have enough space for multiple active fulls.
So in other words, we would have 1 full weekly backup and a set of increments to restore from. At this point, losing 6 days of work is not a big deal in the case of a disaster. However, we could determine in the future that we need to restore from any of those days (first 2 months) having at least 1 full backup and again a series of increment to restore from.
So yes, you can schedule backup to tape job to run Virtual Full Backups. You need to create backup job running once a week with 9 restore points using forever forward incremental method(or backup copy job) as a source job for the backup to tape job. And yes, you can schedule the tape job to run "as backup files appear".
So that would mean, I would tick process incrementals and it would just create only one full backup per month with the rest of the days offloading only increments to tape. So I would be able to restore any one day for these 2 months.
Do I set continue media set to always continue or generate a new media set periodically?
It means that you will create only one full backup during the first run and all other backups will be incremental. In 2 months you will have 9 restore points and you will be able to restore from any of them.
I just want to clarify something. Our backup schedule would be like this for the 2 months retention. The restore points on disk would have a different retention policy (14 days) with forever forward backup jobs.
Week1: Full Virtual Synthesized on Tape (1 VBK) - Kept until all VIBs expire
Week2: Offload increments of week 2 on tape (VIBs) - We can restore from any day with these including the previous VBK
Week3: Offload increments of week 3 on tape (VIBs) - We can restore from any day with these including the previous VBK
Week4: Offload increments of week 4 on tape (VIBs) - We can restore from any day with these including the previous VBK
Week 5: Full Virtual Synthesized on Tape (1 VBK) - Kept until all VIBs expire
Week 6: Offload increments of week 6 on tape (VIBs) - We can restore from any day with these including the previous VBK
Week 7: Offload increments of week 7 on tape (VIBs) - We can restore from any day with these including the previous VBK
Week 8: Offload increments of week 8 on tape (VIBs) - We can restore from any day with these including the previous VBK
and so on and on.
All of this would be configured with continue on the same media set?
