GFS Retention Policy

[foggy]

Most likely the oldest restore point in the chain didn't reach the day specified for GFS restore point creation. Hard to say without knowing how the job is actually scheduled. The first GFS point is created when regular chain retention is reached and the full backup reaches the specified day.

[btmaus]

So if I have specified 7 restore points in the regular backup job, it needs to have 7 restore points saved before the backup copy job GFS retention will take the first weekly backup?

[Gostev]

Your weekly backup should already taken, and is present on disk in a form of incremental restore point. Again, if this does not happen, you should open a support case to troubleshoot, as this becomes a Backup Copy job issue unrelated to GFS retention policy. I just don't understand from your previous post what exactly the perceived problem is.

Now, if you do see the incremental restore point created on the required day correctly, then most likely all is well. Instead of being removed by retention when the time comes (according to your recent backups retention policy), this restore point will eventually be converted to a standalone GFS full backup. This process is well explained in the User Guide.

[Nadziratelb]

Hello,

I have Veeam V8 with.

I want to keep 30 days of backup for the last month and I want to keep a backup one per month for 6 months.

Currently, I have one primary job with 30 restore points in incremental mode.

What is the best way to do this ?

Secondary Job ?

For 30 restore points can make better use of reverse-incremental?

Thanks for your help

[Shestakov]

Hello Alexander and welcome to the forums!
The best way to achieve your goal is to create a backup copy job with GFS retention to keep monthly backups with individual retention policy.
It`s also considered as the best practice since you will have a copy of backups without taking another snapshot of VMs.

For 30 restore points can make better use of reverse-incremental?

It depends on your goal. With reverse incremental backup you will always have a full restore point the last in the chain, but it`s to take more IO operations during backup process.
Thanks!

[workict]

Hello,

I'm trying to setup our Veeam backup environment but it's not working like how I want it, and I can't see what I'm doing wrong so I thought i'll post it here and maybe someone can explain to me what i'm doing wrong.

My goal is to create a daily backup job and keep it saved for 14 days, besides that I want to create a week backup (which get saved for 4 weeks), a month backup (which get saved 12 months) and finally a year backup.

I now created a backup job which backing up all my VMware virtual servers, this job makes an incremental backup on Monday to Saturday at 22:00.
On sunday's it makes an synthetic within this backup job, and the restore point to keep on disk is set to 14 (This job is running every day so it seems to work fine).

I then created a backup copy job for the weekly backup named WeeklyJob, I then choose by Copy Every 1 day at 23:00 and by the tab Virtual Machines I selected the Backup job name.
On the target tab I selected Weekly backup 4 (to keep 4 weekly backups saved?) and start on Sunday at 8:00.

But what I see is that this copy job is running everyday at 23:00.
The same problem I have with the month copy job I created, I selected the same settings as the Weekly copy job except the month copy job starts on the first day of every month, but that copy job is also running everyday at 23:00.

What am I doing wrong that the copy jobs are running everyday and not only on the selected day and time?

[PTide]

Hi and welcome to the community.

What am I doing wrong that the copy jobs are running everyday and not only on the selected day and time?

this

I then choose by Copy Every 1 day at 23:00

That one should have been set to 7 days.

Next, if you want your backup copy job to run on specific days/time periods ony please use "time window" option in scheduling tab.

Thank you.

[foggy]

Please review this thread and GFS retention description in the user guide for better understanding of how it is considered to work. Basically, you do not need several backup copy jobs, you can have a single one that will create both weekly and monthly restore points. If you do not need it to create regular incremental restore points and want just GFS fulls, set the number of regular restore points to a minimum of 2.

[workict]

Hello PTide,

Thank you for your answer, but on the edit backup copy job page I can only select by the Copy every from a dropdown menu the options: Minute, Hour or Day and a starting time.
How can I set that value to 7 days ?

[foggy]

Select Day for the Copy every interval and specify 7 in the interval value box to the left.

[workict]

OMG
I never saw the number in front of Day that you can change it..... I feel so stupid.

I'm gonna change that setting and I think everything would work fine then.
Thanks for the support guys.

[stuartmacgreen]

Support Case 01099566.

I opened this case for clarification on what I see and understanding a comment in the documentation...

One and the same full backup can be marked as weekly, monthly, quarterly and/or yearly. When transforming weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly backup chains, Veeam Backup & Replication checks the flags set for the full backup file. If the full backup file belongs to some other retention policy tier and must be retained on the target backup repository, such backup file will not be removed.

Taken from http://helpcenter.veeam.com/backup/80/v ... olicy.html

I have not seen a screenshot of any Backup Copy Job properties on Disk to compare what I see in my environment.

Let me summary my Backup Job and Backup Copy Job in question.

Backup Job: "nemesis"
- Incremental, create active full periodically Weekly on Saturday
- Restore points to keep on disk: 14
- secondary target: "nemesis copy"
- Run job scheduled everyday at 0600

Backup Copy Job: "nemesis copy"
- copy interval: 1 day start at 0550
- restore points to keep: 30
- Keep:
-- 8 Weekly - Sunday 0600
-- 6 Monthly - 1st Sunday of month
-- 0 Quarterly
-- 0 Yearly

Heres what I see on disk - (screenshot below) My query is at marking #1 why do i have 2 full backups 1 day apart? - a Monthly and a Weekly. Are these not the same backup as detailed above in the documentation and should be marked as such. I'm thinking in previous version of Veeam that these vbk's were marked as W/M, and that a tooltip used to appear also (which does not in v8).

Is this is what IS expected? Further that these Weekly backups are date stamped on a Monday not a Sunday that I chose in the copy job config.
The question mark was also to highlight these filenames are missing a suffix for the retention type.



Or do I have a problem with any of my jobs configuration.

Thanks for any clarification and enhanced understanding on this matter.

[foggy]

The problem is indeed in job configuration. The fact that you have backup copy sync interval set to start at 5:50 results in two facts:
1. Each time it copies restore point that was created on the previous day (not relevant to your issue, though).
2. When GFS mechanism comes into action (during backup copy job retention), it looks for the time specified for weekly restore point (6:00) and checks the current full backup time stamp, which is 5:50. So weekly point is not put aside on that day. However, for monthly point the job does not check the time, only day, so it just takes that full and marks it as monthly point. The full as of Monday meets the Sunday 6:00 requirement for weekly point, so it is marked as weekly.

To fix that, you just need to set backup copy interval to start at 6:00 (or a few minutes later), as it is always recommended to do. The job will wait for the new source restore point to be created, copy it, and mark the same full created on first Sunday of each month both as monthly and weekly.

Regarding the second (naming) issue, logs need to be investigated, that's not expected.

[stuartmacgreen]

Thanks foggy. For pin pointing my deficiencies. Have amended my jobs.
This explains a lot more than the help pages do or come across.
This topic (9 forum pages so far) could maybe do with a whiteboard video or webinar session with more technical practices and example setups and presentation of what you end up with.

Thanks again.

[Shestakov]

Hello Stuart,
There is a webinar with deep dive in Veeam Backup Copy Jobs.
Hope that helps.

[workict]

Goodmorning,

I have made a daily backup job with veeam which backup al my vmware servers.
This job is making a synthetic full backup on saturday and a incremental backup on sunday till friday.
With 14 restore point to keep.
And this job is working perfect on the scheduled time every day 22:00 hour.

But now I want to setup a backup copy job which will make a monthly and yearly backup and store it.
I created a backup copy job and seletected the copy every 1 day timer at 01:00 hour.
I selected by objects to process the daily backup job.
And for backup repository i selected a different repository then the daily backup.
I set the option restore points to keep to 2, and selected the option keep the following restore points>
Monthly backup 12 en yearly backup 12 (I want 12 monthly backups and yearly backup to be saved).

I set the timer on the monthly job for the first day of the month and the year job on 1ste of January.
And when I create this job I see the job status is Idle with next run status continuous.

But on the first of this month there was no copy job created....
Yesterday I selected the second day of the month and hoping that tonight it would copy but still nothing happens.

What am I doing wrong? And what do I need to change so that the backup copy jobs will run according the scheduled days?

[PTide]

Hi,

Were any restore points copied by backup copy job at all? If so then please wait until tomorrow because GFS restore point will be created at the moment when your copy-job full (which contains the state of VM as of December 1st) is to be merged with copy-job increment (which contains December 2nd).

If no restore points are present at target side then please setup you backup copy job to start daily at 22:05 (interval of 24 hours).

Thank you.

[workict]

The backup copy job GFS retention is still confusing me and makes no sense to me because my job is not running on the moment I selected.
Like I said the post here above I have a daily scheduled job and from that job I created a backup copy job to save the backup in a different backup repository.

Now I make these settings on my backup copy job:
Copy every: 1 day starting at 22:15
Objects to process: DailyVM backup - backup job
Restore points to keep: 2
Weekly backup: 13 (saturday 01:00)
Monthly backup: 12 (first saturday of the month)
yearly backup: 12 (1 day of january)

But when I look at restore point available from the copy job I now see a full backup from 6 december and a incremental backup from 8 december.
But 6 december was a sunday and 8 december was a tuesday.
And I did not select those days to make a copy of a backup.

What am I doing wrong with the backup copy job that it's not running on the days I select ?

[foggy]

I recommend to review the corresponding user guide section to get a better idea of how backup copy job retention works. Restore points you see in your repository are the ones comprising the regular backup copy job chain, the first full and subsequent increment (since you've configured it to copy on a daily basis and selected 2 restore points to keep). The first weekly restore point will be created when the regular full backup will reach the next Saturday.

[workict]

I read the user guide section, the only problem is that I don't get the logic of the options you can select.
In the user guide section there is no example on how to setup the backup copy job to get a example schedule.
That's why I came to this forum because I setup thing in the backup copy job that looks logic to me but the job doesn't run like I would.

I just don't understand what the Copy every, Restore points to keep options does for the backup copy job.
And when I setup a time to keep the following restore points to run for a weekly backup that on that time nothing happens.

If you see the example schedule on the link you gave, Weekly backups on sunday, Monthly backup on the last saturday and the rest of the month a regular backup.
Where can I see in the user guide how you need to setup the jobs in order to get such a backup schedule?

[Shestakov]

You can try this Restore Point Simulator to check number and size of restore points. Just choose Backup Copy Job GFS from the 1st drop-down list.
Thanks!

[veremin]

I just don't understand what the Copy every

This setting defines copy interval.

Restore points to keep options does for the backup copy job

How many restore points should be preserved for simple retention.

[foggy]

And when I setup a time to keep the following restore points to run for a weekly backup that on that time nothing happens.

GFS restore points are created when the regular chain retention is reached and the full backup reaches the specified day (this happens not exactly on the day you specify for GFS restore point, but when the full reaches that day).

[neilmacneil]

Hello again,

I have a backup copy job that is being saved to DataDomain with boost enabled. The retention is 31 and I have GFS enabled with 2 monthly's set for every first of the month. The main backup job that it is copying from is also set to 31 point retention and is fairly new so it currently only has 18 backups saved. I was expecting to see a new full restore point on the datadomain for February 1st (monday) but I do not. Is there something I am missing?

-Neil

[SpiderPig]

Hi,

Im having some problems understanding how this actually works. My GFS goals (for this test) is to keep a full restore point for two weeks. I want the backup made on sundays to be stored. When i check my restore points form backup copy jobs i get one friday and two tuesday. I dont get it. What am i doing wrong here?

This is my settings:





Restore: (full on tuesdays

[foggy]

You need to wait until the number of restore points in the regular chain reaches 7 (full + 6 increments) and then GFS restore point will be offloaded when the full backup of the regular chain reaches the specified day (Sunday).

[tdewin]

Could it be that you started the job on a Tuesday (edit or resync)? It says your sync interval every 7 days instead of the default daily interval.

[SpiderPig]

Could it be that you started the job on a Tuesday (edit or resync)? It says your sync interval every 7 days instead of the default daily interval.

Yes, this could be it. If this is the case, are my full backups from sunday data and the vbk file created tuesday or ist it tuesday data and the vbk file created tuesday?
Can i "force" the copy job to do my biddings with the schedule or should i edit the job next sunday?

[foggy]

Currently your full backups contain data as of Tuesdays. If you want the backup file to be created exactly on Sundays, then yes, you need to either edit the job on that day or configure backup window to prevent backup copy from running until Sunday. How your source backup jobs are configured?

[SpiderPig]

My source backup is configured as this:

Retention policy: 7 days on disk,
Backupmode: Incremental with synthetic full on saturday
Runs daily at 23:59