Backup Retention Help

[zuldan]

We recently migrated to Veeam and setup our jobs for the first time. The retention we used was, Full Backup (Friday) and Incremental (Monday to Thursday). The job was set to 20 recovery points which would allow us to restore data within a 4 week period.

However, according to this KB https://www.veeam.com/kb2056 we should only have a maximum of 14 recovery points when using a Exagrid (which we are) and if you need to retain more than 14 recovery points, you should use Backup Copy Jobs to gain longer retention. So we changed the Backup Job from 20 to 10 recovery points with the aim of configuring a Backup Copy Job to give us the remaining 2 week coverage to get us back to 4 weeks.

Below is the Backup Job settings.

Below is the Backup Copy Job settings.


So my questions are:

1. Will the settings above allow us to restore data from 4 weeks ago from any day Monday to Friday? If not, what should the settings be?
2. The Backup Copy Job restore points will overlap with the Backup Job. Both the Backup Job and Backup Copy Job will allow you to restore data from 2 weeks back. Is there anyway to make it so that the Backup Copy Job only has restore points which cover 3 to 4 weeks back? I have a feeling these it's not possible because of the nature of a Backup Copy, but I thought it's worth asking.

[Shestakov]

Hello and welcome to the community!
1. No, with current configuration you will have 2 copies of last 5 backups (one chain created by backup job, another by backup copy), 5 more backups from day6 to day10(produced by backup job) and 4 weekly full backups kept by backup copy retention.
2. That is not possible either and that`s against the best practices, which suggest to have 2 copies of backups.
In your case I would either set backup job retention =10 and backup copy retention = 20 restore points with no GFS or just keep working with 20 restore points on the backup job.
Thanks!

[zuldan]

Hi Shestakov, thank you for your welcome. The community here seems to be very active

1. No, with current configuration you will have 2 copies of last 5 backups (one chain created by backup job, another by backup copy), 5 more backups from day 6-day 10(produced by backup job) and 4 weekly full backups kept by backup copy retention.

Thank you very much for the explanation.

2. That is not possible either and that`s against the best practices, which suggest to have 2 copies of backups.
In your case I would either set backup job retention =10 and backup copy retention = 20 restore points with no GFS or just keep working with 20 restore points on the backup job.

I forgot to mention we are also backing up to tape so we have 2 copies of backups The Backup Copy Jobs would just be to extend our retention for Instant VM restoration from the Exagrid. We have now changed our recovery points from 5 to 20 and removed GFS. Thank you for your advise.

[Shestakov]

You are welcome, zuldan
If you backup to tape as well, backup copy job is not really required unless you have much of repository space. But it`s up to you.