Hyper-V Single Server - Backup Rotation/Management

[nutter1979]

Hi,

I'm looking for some best practice help here, i'm not totally new to Veeam i've had it deployed on a single site for about 5 years but no other sites so limited experience.

I've got a new deployment of a single Hyper-V server and Veeam Backup and Replication 9.5, i'm looking at how to best achieve what i want to do any help gratefully received plus any best practice tips etc.

This is what i've got.
1 x Hyper-V Server
1 x Synology NAS
18 x USB3 External HDD's

What i'm looking to achieve is daily backups for 2 weeks, weekly's for 4 weeks and monthly's for 6 months.

The NAS was intended as a secondary backup location.

Currently i'm doing a reverse incremental to the attached External Disk and then running a backup copy job to the NAS.

However from what i've been reading it may be better to change this:

Main Backup to NAS
2 Separate removable media repositories, 1 for daily's and one for GFS which will do Weekly and Monthly's with separate jobs configured for each - the reason being that GFS doesn't support daily's.

Am i heading in the right direction with this or totally off track?

Thanks

Lee

[DGrinev]

Hi Lee and welcome to the community!

Main backup to NAS sounds good, also you can review existing topic about Veeam B&R and Synology as it contains useful considerations.
The second part should be reconstructed, since the GFS retention is a part of the backup copy job, so it can produce restore points daily.
I'd recommend you to stick with a single backup copy job for the daily, weekly and monthly restore points to the external hdds. Thanks!

[nutter1979]

Hi Dmitry,

Thanks for your reply.

I should have made clear in my original post that i wanted to offsite the daily backups in addition to the weekly and monthly using the External HDD's - which is where i'm getting a bit stuck in terms of how to manage the media rotation.

Are you saying a single backup copy job will tolerate the attached disk being changed everyday and create the full backups on the disk?

What should i be setting the retention settings to in the job?

Thanks

Lee

[DGrinev]

Now I got it, you should use Repository with Rotated Drives on the external HDDs for the main backup job, since archive GFS backups cannot be stored in the repository with rotated drives.
So, in this scenario you will have your daily backups on the external rotated disks and the copy job chain with the archived GFS restore points on the NAS.
You can configure simple retention of the BCJ according to the desired count of daily RPs on NAS and GFS retention will be 4 weekly, 6 monthly as you mentioned it before. Thanks!

[nutter1979]

Hi,

Thanks for getting back to me again.

So presumably I should just set the daily backup job to do an active full everyday and just manually rotate the disks as planned? - is there anyway of ensuring backups don't get overwritten if the disk is not swapped?

What do i need to set the retention settings to for the external disks?

In terms of the NAS i suppose i just configure retention for as long as i can provided the data will fit on the NAS?

Thanks

Lee

[DGrinev]

So presumably I should just set the daily backup job to do an active full everyday and just manually rotate the disks as planned?

No, you should set retention policy to 14 restore points with periodically active fulls and rotate disks as you wish.
Please review this article about How repository with rotated drives work.

is there anyway of ensuring backups don't get overwritten if the disk is not swapped?

Since the rotated drive option is enabled, it performs check during every backup session, if there is a consistent backup chain on the currently attached drive the job will start incremental run.

In terms of the NAS i suppose i just configure retention for as long as i can provided the data will fit on the NAS?

You can set BCJ retention to 7, that should be enough to have a week long copy on the secondary media with the GFS RPs for archival purposes. Thanks!

[nutter1979]

Thanks i've now set the retention on the NAS and read through the link you supplied about Rotated Media Repositories and how they work so i'm feeling a lot better about that.

The only remaining query is that you suggest setting 14 restore points for the rotated media - however this means that only 14 days will be retained on the external rotated media.

I am trying to retain initially 6 months on external rotated media as follows:

8 x M-T disks i.e 2 weeks M-T
4 x Friday disks
6 x Monthly disks

This is why initially i was wondering about having a separate job and repository for the daily's which would be set to 2 weeks retention.

Thanks

[DGrinev]

Since GFS full backups cannot be delivered to the rotated drive repository by the copy job, you can manually copy monthly GFS restore points to the dedicated disks for monthly archive. Thanks!

[nutter1979]

Hi,

Are you saying there is no way to do this within the Veeam software other than resorting to manually copying the files or creating scripts?

Presumably the backup on the disk will still be usable if we set the retention to 14 days but simply don't attach it again for say 6 months (either to overwrite it with a new job or to restore files from the backup contained on it)?

Thanks

Lee

[DGrinev]

Hi Lee,

Unfortunately, that's a limitation related to GFS restore points.
Yes, you can plug in monthly disks once every month, the job will create a full backup and every time you will plug them again the job will create a new full backup followed by deletion of previous\old one.