The length of backup chains (chains that contain one full backup and a set of subsequent incremental backups) on HPE StoreOnce cannot be greater than 7 restore points. The recommended backup job schedule is the following: not more than 1 incremental backup once a day, not fewer than one full backup (active or synthetic) once a week.
Yes, really. This has to deal with a [very low] maximum amount of open files limitation of StoreOnce. From what I know, HP was going to lift this number in future firmware releases.
This number only limits length of full-increment-increment chain, so you may have any number of such chains simultaneously, or a GFS with lots of fulls.
It will work good for two reasons:
1. Since two fulls are totally independent from each other, you need to open only a full to restore from it, while for increments chain you need to open all the chain for restore from latest point.
2. GFS fits deduplication storage well, you can make more GFS point taking less space, just because of deduplication.
With Storeonce, number of simultaneous opened files for a deduplicated share is related to the size of the Appliance.
And like Anton said, the numbers will get bigger in future firmware.
By the way, when using dedupe Appliances, having a weekly full is not a bad thing at all. It provides good restore speed by not having to open a long incremental chain. The only drawback is the load it puts on the source storage because when you have hundreeds of TBs it can quickly become difficult to fit the backup Window.
Veeamizing your IT since 2009/ Veeam Vanguard 2015 - 2023
Only if you do active fulls and thus you need to retrieve data everytime from the production storage, but I'd honestly suggest synthetic fulls for a dedupe appliance, especially for storeonce (and datadomain) where we support their native protocol, so we can do the transform operation of the synthetic in a very short time. In this way, even during a "full" day you just retrieve another incremental from the production storage.
Luca Dell'Oca Principal EMEA Cloud Architect @ Veeam Software
Hi.
I'm looking to setup Backup copy job to remote site to HP StoreOne Catalyst Store.
I'm guessing the limitation of 7 restore point chains still applies here as per the guide? So in the case of a Backup Copy job you would HAVE to use the GFS weekly selection to be consistent? Any tips here?
Thanks.
User Guide - Limitations for HP HtoreOnce
"The length of backup chains (chains that contain one full backup and a set of subsequent incremental backups) on HP StoreOnce cannot be greater than 7 restore points. The recommended backup job schedule is the following: not more that 1 incremental backup once a day, not fewer than one full backup (active or synthetic) once a week"
Limitation applies to backup copy jobs, however, there's no requirement to enable GFS and read the entire restore point data from source backup, you can leave it to be forever forward incremental with 7 restore points retention.
Except you cannot enable BCJ active full for non-GFS retention but anyway, even with GFS retention does not change anything, as the limitation described in the second post of this topic sits in the storage itself and will not magically disappear with enabling BCJ active full.
HPE StoreOnce has a limit on the number of concurrently opened files. Due to this limit, the maximum length of backup chains (chains that contain one full backup and a set of subsequent incremental backups) on HPE StoreOnce is also limited and depends on the particular storage model. For more information, see the Storage models and number of restore points table.
For the unstructured data backup, the limitation on the backup chain length cannot be applied. In this case, we recommend that you use a storage appliance that can open at least 64 file sessions.
HPE StoreOnceTable — Storage models and number of restore points
Please configure periodic full backups (Active or Synthetic) to overcome the chain length limitation. A chain in this case refers to a VBK + its incremental backups, and that is what cannot be greater than the values listed in the User Guide depending on your Storeonce model.
David Domask | Product Management: Principal Analyst
Hi David, thank you for your response. We encountered performance bottlenecks in StoreOnce when performing full synthetic backups. After investigation, we found that StoreOnce's cache is not utilized during synthetic backups. Additionally, we contacted HPE, and their SE mentioned that there is no document from HPE that limits the backup chain; it is a limitation from Veeam itself. This issue needs to be resolved by Veeam.
Tell their SE to talk to the HPE Catalyst dev team, as it's indeed a legacy Catalyst API limitation.
Veeam doesn't have this limitation for ANY other backup target, and obviously we would not randomly do extra work to implement and test the restriction for one particular target, if this was not required due to API limit around the number of open files.
only 7 restore points ........really?
