Retention questions

[fkondon]

Hello,
I am new to Veeam and just installed Weeam backup & Replication 10 on my environment. I want to have the setup as follows:
Mon-Friday take incremental & Saturday take Full.
I wish to take less restore point say 3 so I don't run out of my disk space too quick. We have VMs, Windows, Exchange 2013, SQL servers & Linux servers.
Can someone advise how I can schedule my jobs, I want to create x1 Linux job for x2 Linux servers, x1 Exchange job for x2 exch servers, 1x job for x40 VM servers.

Please also confirm which full backup type (Active 0r Synthetic) and incremental type (Forward or Sureback) I can use for my scenario.

Also explain retention Policy and its Restore points and how they work.

Thanks/Regards
Felix

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Felix,
for short chains like yours(3 restore points you say?) you will not see much benefit from doing periodic full backup, and you can keep it Forever Forward Incremental backup by disabling all periodic full options in the job settings(Synthetic\Active). Set retention to 3 restore points. That will yield a backup chain with 1 Full + 2 incremental backups. Each day, an efficient incremental backup will be done, moving entire chain up and pruning older data from it.
In terms of explanation how it works, please check respectful User Guide pages, as they have perfect description of the entire process!
/Thanks!

[fkondon]

Hi Egor,
Thanks for your response, I want to have 7 restore points, ie Saturday 1st Active Full backup, Mon- Fri incremental, please advise the backup settings for my scenario, ie in terms of Active full, Synthetic and incremental.
Also can you explain a bit on what's the difference between if I choose 7 restore points & 7 days? Please also confirm how many backup files I should have If I choose 7 restore points and if I choose 7 days respectively.
Thankyou.
Felix.

[Egor Yakovlev]

- disable both Active and Synthetic full options in job settings, that will make chain Forever Forward Incremental, with just 1 Full backup.There is no need of additional full backups.
- If you set Job Schedule to "daily", then there will be no difference between "7 Days" and "7 Restore Points" . If you set job schedule, for example, to run every 4 hours, "7 Days" retention will yield 7*24/4=42 backups retained(6 backups a day) , whereas "7 Restore Points" will keep last 7 restore points.
/Cheers!

[foggy]

Also keep in mind that if for any reason, someday the backup is not created, daily retention will still remove restore points that are outside of the specified number of days period.

[fkondon]

Hi Egor,
Once again thanks for your response, appreciated.
1. My option is to still take full backup every Saturday (and take incremental Mon-Fri per wk). How can I configure the full backup in my case?
2. I have a Windows file server, how can I configure backup job to backup files on this file server? Explain a bit on "Adding managed server file share" and "adding File Shares", does to basically mean the same or different?
3. I have x2 production windows exchange server 2013 running, can I run backup jobs individually or I can add both on 1 backup job?
4. If I schedule 3-4 full jobs at 11:00pm, do they start and run at 1:00pm concurrently or one at a time?

Thanks!
Felix.

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Felix.
1. Periodic Fulls are controlled on the Storage-Advanced tab of Job settings. Active or Synthetic option is available to you - result is the same, however Active puts more load on Production storage, whereas Synthetic heavily loads Repository disks. Choose whatever best for your infrastructure.
1.1 note that by enabling periodic full backups your backup chain will no longer be Forever Forward, and will turn into classic Forward Incremental. That will change Retention Cleanup cycle and yeild more restore points on the repository.
2. Pretty much the same. Here is How-To. Whenever possible in virtual infrastructures try sticking with Image Level backup - so if that same windows server could be protected from vSphere\Hyper-V layer, I would run it that way instead.
3. Yes, you can group them together in same job, or depending on your infrastructure requirements backup only passive node. Here is an old but still valid guide.
4. All jobs scheduled at 11.00pm will start at 11.00pm no matter what. However, there are performance bottlenecks that might occur, leading to some tasks within jobs(say VM disk processing) to wait until resources become available. For example Backup Proxy has 4 CPU cores making it able to process 4x vmdk disks same time. If Job1 has 2 VMs with 2 vmdk each, 2nd job will launch and stay in "Waiting for backup resources to be come available" status until one of the VM disks from Job1 finishes processing. Here is a great read on resource scheduling.
/Cheers!

[fkondon]

Hi Egor,
Thanks for your feedbacks: Few more queries please.

1. On each backup job report we will get each day, how can I configure email notification so on each report to state whether it’s a full active job, full synthetic job or incremental job
2. How can I create backup jobs for Linux and Physical Windows servers, do I need to install agents before creating backup jobs?
3. If I do not have the purchased licenses for agents yet Linux & physical servers, can I still use the free agents for Linux & physical windows servers? if so where can I download the agents to download?
4. I have schedules my backup jobs as Synthetic Full every Saturday, Incremental (checked) & Active Full very Saturday. Job schedule is On these days - MON-SAT. Can you confirm if Incremental will run on Mon-Sat or Mon- Fri only. Do both full jobs run on Saturday as selected? Which full job option is best to select here?
5. If I not select Active full job for this Saturday (1st full job) and only select Synthetic, will the first full job still run, or I need to select Active full to get the first full job?

Thanks/appreciate.
Felix.

[Egor Yakovlev]

1. You configure global notifications via Email Notification Settings.
2. Yes, physical machines are protected via Agents. Here is Agent Management Guide.
3. Free Veeam Community Edition could be used, but it is limited to 10 instances total. Agents are essential part of Veeam Backup and Replication, you don't need to download them separately.
4. You don't need to schedule both Active and Synthetic fulls - if you decided to go Periodic full path, than choose one that is best for your infrastructure. Incremental backup is done by default that do not have Active\Synthetic full, so answering your question, if Active or Synthetic full backup is scheduled on Saturday, than rest of the week it will be incremental backups. Best full job should be decided by you - like mentioned before, Active Full puts more load on production storage(to read entire machine again), whereas Synthetic full puts heavy load on Target Repository(to synthesize backup from pieces).
5. No matter of job settings, first backup is always Active Full. We need to start somewhere to track changes for incremental backups, right? You don't need to worry about first run.
/Cheers!

[fkondon]

Hi Egor,

Thanks for your response, appreciate.

1. How can I prioritise jobs (like highest, high, low, medium, low, lowest)?
2. if I schedule 2-3 jobs to run at 11:00pm, can they run concurrently at 11:00pm?
3. I see some jobs are waiting to run (in queue), while one is running, what does that mean?
4. I see most of my Windows SQL servers job completes with this warning "SQL VSS Writer is missing: databases will be backed up in crash-consistent state and transaction log processing will be skipped"
How can I fix this?

Cheers;
Felix.

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Felix,
1. There is no "weight" priority setting between jobs. You can set different schedules to prioritize processing by time.
2. Yes, if your backup infrastructure has enough resources to process machines in parallel. Here is good read on it.
3. That means backup infrastructure is fully loaded. Usually(not limited to) it is caused by either low Proxy CPU cores count or Repository parallel tasks limit. Check link above.
4. Check this KB.
/Thanks!