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nyxpdx
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Forever incremental on rotated media

Post by nyxpdx »

Spent half of today reading through documentation, knowledgebase/faqs, and other posts on here, but I'm still a little uncertain how to successfully achieve what I'm trying to do, so I'm just going to lay it out here and hope someone understands all this better than I seem to.

I've got 3 backup jobs backing up to our NAS: One backs up our 4 VMs, the other two back up physical machines via the agent. This works fine, and I think I have a pretty good grasp on.

Next, we've got a set of 3 drives that are rotated out every day to keep one offsite at all times. This repository has the rotated hard drives option set, and I've got backup copy jobs for the backup jobs pointed there. The drives can only hold 1 full backup and a few incrementals at most.

Now, what I'm hoping to do and am having a hard time understanding, is the right way to setup the backup copy jobs (if possible) to be a forever incremental where each time the copy runs it creates a new incremental and then merges the full with the oldest incremental, so there's always a full and a couple incrementals or so. My guess was to set the restore points to keep at 9, so that once each of the three drives has a full and a couple incrementals the next one will do the merge since it's over 9?

Can anyone verify if this is indeed how it works? I'd rather set it up correctly now than fiddle with it, wait a couple weeks to find out it's not working like I thought, change something, wait some more, etc.

Thank you guys,

Nick
DGrinev
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Re: Forever incremental on rotated media

Post by DGrinev »

Hi Nick and welcome to the community!

In general your understanding is correct, except the number of restore points you should set in the retention policy.
When you specify retention settings for a backup copy job targeted at a backup repository with rotated drives, you must define the number of restore points per drive.
For example, if you set retention to 7, the job will keep 7 restore points on every drive in the set.
Please take a look on the article in the User Guide for additional information. Thanks!
nyxpdx
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Re: Forever incremental on rotated media

Post by nyxpdx »

Thanks!

Okay, so the value set for retention policy on a backup copy job to rotated drives (on the Target settings section, just under the selected repository, where it says "Restore points to keep") that number is per drive, correct?

I read through that guide, and it seemed a little vague. Here's the section on backup copy jobs:
For backup copy jobs:
...

3. [For external drives attached to Microsoft Windows servers] Veeam Backup & Replication checks the retention policy set for the job. If some backup files in the backup chain are outdated, Veeam Backup & Replication removes them from the backup chain.
So, it creates a full on the empty drive, then creates incrementals until it hits retention policy (say I set to 3), on the fourth iteration it creates a new incremental, and then point 3 above says since we've gone over the retention policy for the job it "removes them from the backup chain" but what I couldn't determine is if this means it will delete the original full backup (since it is the oldest) and create a new one or merge the oldest incremental with the original full... which now that I'm thinking about it, deleting the full wouldn't really make sense because that would make the rest of the backup chain completely useless, so I'm guessing it does the merge.

Just to put it to bed, is that correct?
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Re: Forever incremental on rotated media

Post by DGrinev »

That's correct, the oldest increment will be merged/injected into the full backup file.
The backup copy job utilize Forever Forward Incremental backup method by default, that's why it acts according to the FFI retention policy workflow. Thanks!
foggy
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Re: Forever incremental on rotated media

Post by foggy »

Just to additionally stress it, retention works this way only in case target repository is a Windows one (not CIFS).
nyxpdx
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Re: Forever incremental on rotated media

Post by nyxpdx »

foggy wrote:Just to additionally stress it, retention works this way only in case target repository is a Windows one (not CIFS).
Care to elaborate? Does this only apply to rotated drive repositories, or all, or only backup copy jobs, or all jobs???
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Re: Forever incremental on rotated media

Post by foggy »

In case of rotated drives, per drive retention is only possible for backup copy jobs pointed to Windows repository.
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