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ChrisGundry
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Feature request - GFS scheduling method change/option

Post by ChrisGundry »

Hi,

I have been told by support case #02151683 to submit this as a feature request on the forum as they have no ability to submit feature requests. Please do not merge this post.

Problem: We have a requirement to keep 5 weekly backups plus 6 monthly backups at month end. Support have advised that the only way to get GFS points on the correct weekly and month end days is to run the job on a daily schedule. With the current behaviour, running the job daily means it copies restore point data every day of the month, even if there is no GFS point requested on that day, then does a merge process (to keep within the 'normal' restore point limit you have set). This is wasteful to us when we only require 6 restore points per month being created and it is copying data every day of the month. This also means that the helpdesk users get a daily email for a GFS job which as far as they are concerned they should only get on a Saturday and on the 1st of the month. This creates confusion.

I can't think of a scenario where a company would want to have it run in this way because you can only keep 1 weekly point per week and 1 monthly point per month. So the most frequently the job would run is twice per week, once on the weekly day and once on the monthly day. One week of the month would contain both days and result in a double run that week.

Request: I would like an option to have Veeam create GFS points without having to copy data on a daily basis, only copy on the days specified
Maybe it could work like this: GFS jobs have the option to keep no 'normal' restore points, do away with them completely if possible and have 'GFS only' option. Have an option to run the job only on the specified GFS schedule, not daily, and create the backups only on that schedule. I am guessing that it might then have to use the 'copy restore points from source backup location' as standard (because there are no 'normal backups' to use), but I think that would be fine with us. We would rather copy data and perform merges only on the required days. This also has the benefit that we are not creating backups from the 'normal backups' that are merged every day and could become corrupted over time?

At the moment I am working on a way to start the jobs on the required days of the month using windows task scheduler and then end them using a finishing script in the job. This should give us the behavior we want, but it shouldn't be that tricky to get that behavior. Feedback on that method would also be appreciated.

Thanks
foggy
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Re: Feature request - GFS scheduling method change/option

Post by foggy »

Hi Chris, haven't you thought of setting the copy every interval to 7 days, to avoid daily sync?
ChrisGundry
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Re: Feature request - GFS scheduling method change/option

Post by ChrisGundry »

You have forgotten our recent conversation I think Foggy: veeam-backup-replication-f2/gfs-retenti ... 5-195.html

I previously had it set to weekly, but then the monthly points are not generated on the correct day because the closest restore point was generated weekly which would mean the 'monthly' point is up to 6 days away from the actual month end date.
foggy
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Re: Feature request - GFS scheduling method change/option

Post by foggy »

Ok, so you'd like to have it on the exact end of the month and without daily sync, which is indeed not possible with the current implementation.
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Re: Feature request - GFS scheduling method change/option

Post by ChrisGundry »

Yes, so if you have specified every Friday and also on the last day of the month then it will only run and only copy data on those days.
ChrisGundry
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Re: Feature request - GFS scheduling method change/option

Post by ChrisGundry »

Am I able to get an official response to this as a feature request? Thanks
foggy
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Re: Feature request - GFS scheduling method change/option

Post by foggy »

Thanks, Chris, your request is accepted. We are thinking of some improvements in this area, so let's see whether it addresses your use case.
michaelj
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Re: Feature request - GFS scheduling method change/option

Post by michaelj »

I am also interested in this feature request.

The reason I have is the same in that what we are trying to achieve a similar rotation scheme. We have one server with 60TB of space running Windows Server 2016. We have enabled deduplication on the backup data drive.

I have a Backup Job to store 31 points running a daily backup with a weekly full. (this gives us our 5 weekly backups) This works fine with dedplication as the weekly's and incrimentals don't change after created. They also only get removed once a week. We need to somehow be able to keep 11 monthly backups and 5 financial yearly backups.

The problem is with the copy job as this copies the backup to the same machine and I only need it for monthly and yearly full backup runs(this data to fall into deduplication as well) but with the Recent restore points no matter how many days i set the interval to i will have a full backup that will never be deduplicated and will take up unneeded space. Even if i do schedule the job to run on specific days to allow for deduplication this will be removed once a week and as such takes up unnecessary disk io time especially since the recent rotation is not needed as it will be in the source job.
mma
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Re: Feature request - GFS scheduling method change/option

Post by mma »

michaelj wrote:I am also interested in this feature request.

The reason I have is the same in that what we are trying to achieve a similar rotation scheme. We have one server with 60TB of space running Windows Server 2016. We have enabled deduplication on the backup data drive.
Did you try ReFS integration without dedup? It's faster and saves more disk space than deduplication (in my case...)
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