Monthly Archive to Rotating Disk

[brock]

I am looking for some direction on how to best handle my archiving. I am moving from a Unitrends Physical Appliance that had an "RXDA" disk shelf attached to it via eSata. It was extremely easy to use in that you would simply install any number of drives from 1-4, assign it a "name" in the Unitrends UI, and set your job to push a copy of whichever backups you picked to it on a set time. In our case, I did an end of month archive job to a set of two disks that were able to hold 3 months worth of archives. After 3 months, I would pull the two drives out, move them to our offsite location to be housed for 7 years(compliance), and put in a new set of drives. It was as simple as naming the new "set" of disks and the Unitrends software would just continue to function as normal, not caring what disks were currently in the shelf. It would simply sift through the backups, determine what all was needed to copy over to get to the latest restore point(incrementals) and copy them over.

Is there a way to accomplish this same type of scenario with Veeam? Can I simply buy a QNAP 4-bay NAS setup, pop a couple drives in, and set up a backup copy job that specifies rotating media will be used? Or is it more complicated than that?

I should also note that I have two Veeam B&R Servers at two different locations, and they are backing up servers at the opposing locations. So both of these Veeam Servers would need to be able to send data to whatever medium is used for storage of the "archive" copy of data.

Thanks!

[HannesK]

Hello,
yes, rotated media is built to rotate / remove disks.

As far as I see, you are not affected my limitations listed in the user guide: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=100

Best regards,
Hannes

[Mildur]

Can I simply buy a QNAP 4-bay NAS setup, pop a couple drives in, and set up a backup copy job that specifies rotating media will be used

I see a Limitation.
Rotated disks are for usb or esata disks.

If you buy a QNAP NAS, connect the usb/esata disk to the nas and share it over iscsi or nfs/cifs, it will not work for veeam rotated disk scenario. For Veeam, they are a CIFS Repo. Not a usb/esata disk.

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UPDATE:

Ok, it will work somehow not in a good way for me

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=100

Linux and Shared Folder Backup Repository

If you use a Linux server or a shared folder as a backup repository with rotated drives, Veeam Backup & Replication employs a “cropped” mechanism of work with rotated drives. Veeam Backup & Replication keeps information only about the latest backup chain in the configuration database. Information about previous backup chains is removed from the database. For this reason, the retention policy set for the job may not work as expected.

[brock]

So I would have to mount it to my Linux Backup Repo's?

[Mildur]

Linux and Shared Folder are the same behavior.
Veeam will remove the restore points from configuration database.

If you want to have an overview which restore point exists on disconnected disks, you will have to use a windows server to mount the usb/esata disks.