Job Scheduling best practices

[arosas]

Hello everyone, rather new to veeam and have been searching for best practices as far as scheduling jobs goes. I found a couple posts but not exactly my scenario so wanted to run this by the pros here in the forums and see what you thought.

We have different retention time frames for jobs that would look something like this:

Daily Job-S-M-T-W-T-F-Retention time 14 days or in veeam terms 14 restore points.
Weekly Full Saturday-Retention time 5 weeks or 5 restore points.
Monthly Full Sunday-first Sunday every month-retention time 12 months or 12 restore points. (different run time as to not interfere with the daily Sunday job)
Yearly Full-First Sunday of January-Retention is 5 years or 5 restore points. (Different run time as to not interfere with the daily and monthly Sunday job)

My question is that on all of these i'm not sure weather we should be using the synthetic full options or the active full option enabled and also what days those should run as to not overlap? Or a combination of both active and synthetic fulls?

Thanks again in advance and look forward to being part of the veeam community.

[foggy]

Tony, for this kind of retention you'd better utilize backup copy jobs and their GFS retention. For that, you'd first need to create a regular daily backup job and then specify it as a source for the backup copy job that will implement the required GFS (weekly/monthly/yearly) rotation of backups.

[arosas]

Thanks for the idea foggy. I will research backup copy jobs and GFS retention.

[foggy]

Feel free to ask for assistance in further backups configuration, if required.

[arosas]

Hey foggy, hope you are doing well. Wondering if you can give me further advice on my scheduling. This is what we worked out so far and have this setup and running, however we are thinking the weekly copy job on Sunday is interfering especially on the file servers which are rather large. The regular jobs are running but because our backup target\dedupe appliance Exagrid can only process so fast, we get errors on the copy jobs due to the uniqueness of the exagrid landing zone.

Hopefully you can access this spreadsheet I created outlining our backup jobs size and how I have everything scheduled out.

The "archival settings-weekly" column, I believe should be different but not sure what it should be set to as to not interfere with both the primary job and the copy job syncing.

You may have to download the excel sheet to view it formatted correctly.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4pLXj ... sp=sharing

Thanks in advance

[arosas]

Also, if anyone else has any other input on my job scheduling that would be helpful as well.

Thanks

[foggy]

So just to check I'm getting you right, are you saying that when the backup copy job starts new sync interval on Sunday at 4am, the synthetic full from Saturday is still in progress and you see "file is locked" messages in the job session?

Also I'd like to note that storing both primary and secondary backup copies on the same device (as, judging on the spreadsheet, you do) is not considered as best practice - in case of storage fail you are losing everything.

[arosas]

we're not getting file lock messages, all of a sudden we are getting messages of corruption and we are thinking that it may be related. I have opened a ticket with support yesterday but cant help me until Wednesday. Case # 00961997.

As for the backup copies going to the same device we know it's not best practice, however all this data is replicated to other exagrid appliances which will be at our hot site DR location which is 2 hours away.

We haven't cut over our legacy tape backup method yet, so until we move our DR exagrid appliances offsite we will continue to backup using tape method.

Thank You

[foggy]

we're not getting file lock messages, all of a sudden we are getting messages of corruption and we are thinking that it may be related. I have opened a ticket with support yesterday but cant help me until Wednesday. Case # 00961997.

Then this is indeed something that should better be addressed to support.

[Bunce]

As for the backup copies going to the same device we know it's not best practice, however all this data is replicated to other exagrid appliances which will be at our hot site DR location which is 2 hours away.

You're suffering from Veeam's insistence of 'we know better than you' and the refusal to offer a GFS retention on the primary backup. Its actually a result of not being able to given the file based storage format Veeam uses, but well hidden by 'Veeam's best practice'. Unfortunately it screws those of us who handle off-site archival independently - you're not alone - a quick search will show you how often this comes up.