Disk/Disk/Tape with Subsets

[ryanm76]

I'm seeking some guidance on how to achieve our backup strategy. We have 3 sites, A, B, and C. Site C is DR. What I am trying to do is have 2 copies of backups on disk, and once a month put a subset of the data from all 3 sites to tape.

Each site has its own B&R server taking backups of VMs at its own site. Site C is DR, so sites A and B have backup copy jobs that copy everything to DR. Site C then has 3 repositories, 1 for its own site's backups, 1 for site A from site A's backup copy job (imported backups), and 1 for site B from site B's backup copy job (imported backups).

How would I configure a tape backup job that allows me to pick and choose a subset of the backups from each of the 3 sites to put to tape? The tape drive exists only at site C (DR). I am attempting to only write a subset to tape due to size and make it only the critical data. Our previous product we would specify Exchange mailboxes, some SQL databases, some file shares, but there were no VMs to tape. Now in Veeam, we're readjusting to just working at the VM level, and not anything more granular.

Thank you!

[Dima P.]

Hello and welcome to the community ryanm76,

Each site has its own B&R server taking backups of VMs at its own site. Site C is DR, so sites A and B have backup copy jobs that copy everything to DR. Site C then has 3 repositories, 1 for its own site's backups, 1 for site A from site A's backup copy job (imported backups), and 1 for site B from site B's backup copy job (imported backups).

Do you run perform periodic active full backups for backup copy jobs to site C? Thanks.

[ryanm76]

No. Currently the source backup job is doing incremental with weekly (Saturday) synthetic full backups.

The backup copy job is set to keep 4 weekly (Sunday) and 1 monthly (last day of month) as "full backups for archival purposes".

[ryanm76]

I believe we have this worked out using the setup below, again noting that site C is DR.

First disk backup: Sites A, B, and C perform a full backup to their site-local Veeam server.

Second disk backup: Sites A and B run a backup copy job for all backups from the first disk backup above, placing them into a separate repository D:\Site XX Copy that is located on the site C Veeam server.

Tape backup: Sites A and B (C does not need to do this yet) each run a 2nd backup copy job that grabs only specific VMs containing data to be put to tape. It is set to copy these VM backups to yet another, separate repository on the site C Veeam server, D:\Tape. Because sites A and B each already have a repository for all VMs on site C's Veeam server, this job ends up copying from D:\Site XX Copy to D:\Tape. Site C's server has a files to tape job that puts D:\Tape onto tape as scheduled.

This way we're getting all of the automatic backups created we need, and if we need to put something onto tape as well, we simply have to modify the backup copy job that copies into the D:\Tape repository to include that particular VM.