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mikegoodwin
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Specific retention

Post by mikegoodwin »

Hi,

I am trying to come up with a number of jobs / retention policy to allow me to keep a fairly specific set of backups.
This is for a company file server, around 1.5tb in size, with roughly 25gb of daily change.

Ideally, i'd like to keep:

hourly backups for 7 days
daily backups for 30 days
weekly backups for 52 weeks
monthly backups for 12 months

I think this fits to a GFS type of retention, but I can't seem to get my head around how I could implement this?
Right now my thought is to have a standard backup job, set to run hourly and do daily full's, keep 170 retention points (this should satisfy my hourly/daily requirement).
Then do a backup copy job, set to run weekly and keep 52 retention points, therefore meeting my weekly requirement.
Then another backup copy job to do the monthlies.

It just seems to be a bit of a complex way to go about things?

Does anyone have any better thoughts?

Cheers,
Mike
Shestakov
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Re: Specific retention

Post by Shestakov »

Hi Mike!
GFS retention can only be achived with backup copy job and it works with historical weekly/monthly/yearly backups.

To achieve your goal I would do next:
Create a backup job to run hourly with 168 restore points to get hourly backups set.
Create a backup copy job using the backup job as a source and make it run daily with simple retention = 30 + GFS retention of weekly=52, monthly=12

You can also use this The Restore Point Simulator to make a educated guess of the files` size.
Thanks!
mikegoodwin
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Re: Specific retention

Post by mikegoodwin »

Thanks for the reply.

I've implemented as you suggest, but I seem to be running into a problem with the Backup Copy Job never finishing, as the hourly Backup Job locks the restorepoint.

I am using Reverse Incremental for the Backup Job, which I think is the issue (as its modifying the most recent backup file, which the Backup Copy Job is trying to copy....)

Any thoughts on this?
I dont want to change to Incremental, as that could put me in a situation where over 100 incremental files need to be read to restore to a recent point of time.


EDIT: seems that the Backup Copy Job re-starts after the main Backup Job has finished - how will this affect which restore point is being used for the Copy Job?

Thanks,
Mike
Shestakov
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Re: Specific retention

Post by Shestakov »

The behavior is expected, since backup job has bigger priority than backup copy job and stops it to transform the restore point.

Workaround is either make them both runs within 1 hour interval or switch to forward incremental or make backup windows for backup copy jobs to copy the files.
What is the average source job duration now?

By the way, backup copy job runs permanently in one of 4 phases.
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