How to get a full backup every month ?

[CaptainPistache]

Hello Veeam community,

I'm not the one who installed and set up my enterprise's Veeam server and I have a question regarding the behavior of monthly backups.

We have a file server that is backed up monthly (and daily too of course) and I have noticed that some months the backup was full and sometimes it was incremental.
I've made some research on the backup job and I've found the following settings :

- Under "Storage > Advanced" tab, the job is set up to incremental with Active full backup to run monthly every first Sunday.
- Under the "Schedule" tab, the job is scheduled to run monthly every first Sunday at 2 pm.

So my question is why sometimes the backup file is a full one and sometimes it's incremental ?

I don't know if this is the correct thinking process but I'd prefer to have a full backup every months to limit the possibility of chain corruption.
Actually, sometimes two months in a row can be incremental which is risky I guess.

How can I achieve this ?

For information, we're running Veeam Backup and Replication 9.0

Thanks a lot in advance for your help !

[foggy]

Monthly active full is a good practice with forward incremental. You may review this thread for some additional info.

As for the issue you're seeing, am I understanding right, you have two jobs, one that runs daily and another one monthly and the issue is with the second one?

[CaptainPistache]

Hi foggy,
Thanks for your reply.

Yes, you understood correctly but there's no need to bother anymore as I have finally found the explanation.

Under the "Active full backup", I hadn't seen the "Months" option and I can now see that only some months are checked for an active full backup.
Sorry, it was under my eyes from the beginning.

Would you recommend to perform only full backups for monthly backups or is it OK to have incremental backups certain months to save a bit of storage ?

Cheers

[foggy]

Most likely monthly portion of changes will be comparable to a full backup in terms of size, so fulls are typically preferred in this case. Haven't you thought of using the backup copy job for that purpose?

[CaptainPistache]

No, I didn't know about this option. Interesting.

What would be the advantages using backup copy job ?

So, imagine I have a daily backup of my file server and I want to keep a full backup every month using a backup copy job.
I don't really understand what settings I should use on the backup copy job, it's not clear even after reading the documentation.

Can you tell me if the following statements are correct ?

- I have to link my Backup Copy job to my daily backup job
- If the setting "Copy every:" is set to 1 Day, Veeam will copy every day the most recent backup file to the selected repository, independently of if it's a full backup or incremental file
- The settings "Restore points to keep" is just the amount of backup files to keep in the selected repository. So if I copy every 1 day and keep 7 restore points, I will have the last week of my file server backup files in another repository.
- The settings "Keep the following restore points for archival purposes" will create a full backup every X time. Is this setting affected by the "Restore points to keep" ?
- To avoid copying incremental backups and copy only full backups, should I set "Copy every" to 30 Days, "Restore points to keep" to 12 and "Keep the following restore points for ..." to 12 Monthly backup ?

Sorry, I know this is a lot of questions.
Your help is much appreciated.

Thanks a lot.

[DGrinev]

Hi Captain,

An important thing to know, before I start to answer your questions, about backup copy job - it's not simply copying the backup files, but moving VMs datablocks from the source backup chain to the target destination, thus a new backup chain created.

I have to link my Backup Copy job to my daily backup job

It's not mandatory, but yes, you can link it to the daily backup job (there are a couple more options).

If the setting "Copy every:" is set to 1 Day, Veeam will copy every day the most recent backup file to the selected repository

Most part of the statement is correct, but will copy the most recent state of VMs, not a file.

The settings "Restore points to keep" is just the amount of backup files to keep in the selected repository.

Simple retention determines the number of restore points to keep, so you will have a backup chain of 7 RPs in another repository.

The settings "Keep the following restore points for archival purposes" will create a full backup every X time. Is this setting affected by the "Restore points to keep" ?

Yes, it will leave a copy of the full backup according to GFS retention schedule. No, it isn't affected by the simple retention.

To avoid copying incremental backups and copy only full backups, should I set "Copy every" to 30 Days

I would recommend you to set simple retention to 2 with the interval of 1 day, that way the length of the backup chain will be short (not consuming much space) and benefits additional layer of protection from data corruption. Thanks!

[CaptainPistache]

Hello,

Thank you very much for your quick and complete answer.
Great support !

So backup copy to archive full backups is better than creating another backup job because it will read the VM's blocks from an existing backup and thus won't affect the production storage ?
However, if the existing backup is corrupted, the backup copy will be too, so this is a disadvantage comparing to a separate job ?

[DGrinev]

Yes, there is no impact on the production infrastructure.
That's a possible scenario you've described, however, it's highly recommended to use Surebackup job or periodical health check for recoverability testing. Thanks!