Backup to Disk to Data Domain questions

[C_J]

Hi,

looking for some advice.

Currently we are backing up directly to a DD2500. 24TB nightly, incremental with weekly fulls, retaining 120 restore points. To follow what I think is best practice, and to increase the speed of FLR and restores, I want to change this.

I'd like to backup to disk nightly and keep around 10 restore points. Then I'd like to copy these restore points to the DD2500, and as before, retain 120 restore points on the DD. Is this even possible? The issue I'm running into is the DD's limit of 60 restore points between full backups; the best option I can see is to use the GFS style retention, but that won't let me keep 120 daily restore points....

Thanks.

[veremin]

The issue I'm running into is the DD's limit of 60 restore points between full backups; the best option I can see is to use the GFS style retention, but that won't let me keep 120 daily restore points

It will, as long as you enable active full backups for a backup copy job. That can be achieved by enabling "Read entire restore point" option and setting either weekly or monthly full backup (weekly, monthly GFS, accordingly). Thanks.

[C_J]

Hi,
thanks for that. If I enable "Read entire restore point" for the copy job I can then set the "restore points to keep" to 120, which is exactly what I'm looking for.

My question is: What will those restore points be?

The latest 120 restore points that have been copied (by the copy job) from the source (which contains daily jobs with a retention policy of 14) to the DD?

OR

The latest 120 restore points that meet the GFS criteria? I suspect this is what will be kept, in which case is there a way to keep 120 daily backups on the DD?

Thanks.

[foggy]

Those will be restore points in the regular (daily) backup copy job chain. GFS restore points have their own retention defined by the corresponding values configured under the "Keep the following restore points for archival purposes" check box.