disk to tape archive

[CTCarp]

I have B&R v5 that I have running incremental backups nightly and once a week I transfer the backups to tape for archiving. What I would like to do is have a full backup on Saturday and incremental till Wednesday and create a Full Synthetic and copy the full synthetic to tape. However, space is at a premium for storage to disk.

Can I have the above scenario and then have the previous full backup and incrementals delete keeping 1 full backup and the subsequent incrementals till the next Full synthetic?
I may have space for a Full and Synth. Full backups inc. incrementals for 2 weeks -
how many Deleted Vms in retention do I need ? Im not sure

[Gostev]

Sorry, I am confused with your explanation. Can you elaborate please?

[dekkar]

Not too sure if this is what you are looking for.... but we use a reverse incremental option...


So basically, you have your one full backup, and each other backup after that is incremental.... The opposite to how it normally works....


The advantage of this is that you can backup this single file to tape, and this is the full veeam job..... I do exactly that myself every night.

[flavor4real]

Interesting ...
About the reverse incremental option. It makes sense to setup Veeam with the reverse incremental option but if that file is lost then you basically have no backup for that particular job. I've experienced that when we backed up the veeam backup files to tape. It is said that the tape backup application can access the veeam backup files without causing any corruption because the tape backup application will only read the veeam data. Well, not true. We lost many veeam backup files.

so when we are in the middle to setup a copy script to copy the veeam backup files to another disk, which then will be accessed by the tape backup application, netbackup in this case.

Be careful ...

[Gostev]

I would guess this depends on specific tape backup application, too. With proper read-only access, files cannot be corrupted.

[flavor4real]

That's what we were told too but we learned different and I actually found a post that confirms that too. Even if Netbackup only copy the Veeam files onto tape, and Veeam write to the same drive, it actually corrupt the veeam files. It was strange and I could not believe it either.

I'll try to find the post where another admin confirmed.

[CTCarp]

Sorry for the confusion - What I am looking to do is have one full backup a week the rest of the week incremental - then I would create an "archive tape" to send out for well... archive. Then on the same day I would like the full backup to overwrite/replace previous full backup and incrementals startign the cycle of copying to tape for archive and so on. I dont have the space to store more than a 1.5 Tb. Is this where I can reduce the amount of restore points and deleted Vm retention periods? Im not sure what these settings provide?

[Gostev]

Sounds like what you want incremental backup mode with transform option enabled.

[CTCarp]

So instead of a vbk I will have a vrb as a full backup? Then I can backup the one full backup w/o incrementals (because there wont be any at the time) - Does a vrb restore the same way?

[Gostev]

You will still have VBK as full backup, with VRBs (reversed increments) going back from VBK, and VIBs (increments) going forward from VBK.

[CTCarp]

so will I need to create a full backup on say Sunday and have a full synthetic + transform fullbackups into chains on Thursday? Then backing up the new full synthetic on Thursday will be all the backups until that point.
Is the initial full backup (Sunday) the "seed" that I wont have to initialize again until another point in the future? and the vrb created on Thursday is a good accumulative full synthetic backup of the Vm to that point in time. So I can create a backup of the vrb as point in time backup to send out as archive? The following week does the vrb become over written and the vibs get deleted or can they be deleted?

[foggy]

Backing up the synthetic full to tape, you will be able to recover to the day when this synthetic full was created (and only that day). Synthetic full will produce new VBK file with the latest VM restore point. This VBK will be updated to the latest VM state on the next synthetic full day so you will have only one VBK in any given moment.

[CTCarp]

So there wont be anymore vbks after the full syn. has been transformed to a vrb? So this weeks Full Synthetic backup will be tansformed next Thursday to a vrb with that full backup thus keeping on one full backup on disk. what happens to the vib's that are created in between? do they get transformed into the reversed increments as well, leaving the one vrb until the next day, of course, when the incrementals are created again?

[foggy]

Changes from the VIB files are injected into VBK file and all VIB files are transformed into the reversed increments (VRB). You can find a detailed description of the process in the user guide.

[CTCarp]

I have it in front of me however, the whole process wasnt clear to me. Basically I want one backup to send offsite and each week have that backup overwritten. From what I have gathered from above I am going to have incremenatal backups and transform them. On Thursday, or whenever, I will have the lateset state of the vm in a ready-to-store-state on disk then I will copy that to tape for archive. I want to be sure I can restore a Vm or file from this type of backup to ensure business continuity and file restoration.
Thank you Gostev and Foggy

[foggy]

You can be sure you can restore the VM from this "ready-to-store-state" file.

[CTCarp]

Thank you again.