How to put monthly backup to S3?

[Daniel2]

Status Quo:
Our entire vSphere environment is backed up with one daily running job.
Backup mode is incremental.
The retention period is 30 days.
A synthetic backup is created every Saturday.

Side note:
We have a copy job that runs every 2 days and copies everything to a secondary storage.
The retention period is 14 days.

Goal:
We're planning to copy the first (synthetic) full backup of every month to an S3 object storage (Backblaze).
The full backup should be protected by an immutability policy.
The retention period should be 3 months.

Is there any easy way to achieve this? We're really struggling with the way Veeam handles back-ups and capacity tiers. It keeps moving all backups that are older than the newest full-backup to S3 storage, which is not what we want. Our certified service partner has no experience with S3 and is unable to support us. I hope to find help in these forums.

Thank you!

[oleg.feoktistov]

Hi Daniel,


That makes sense. Since backups older than your newest full belong to inactive backup chain and capacity tier's operational restore window is lower than the job's retention policy, all that not deleted yet but not active already, gets moved to capacity.
If your VBR is of v10 or higher, I think the easiest way to achieve your goal would be to:

- Enable GFS for your primary backup job.
- Adjust "Keep monthly full backups for X months" to 3.
- For "Use weekly full backup for the following week of a month" option select "First".
- Configure immutability settings for your S3 storage.
- Make sure that operational restore window setting for your SOBR's capacity tier is > than the job's retention policy.

In such a way, when operational restore window exceeds, nothing from inactive backup chain will be available for offload, except for GFS backup.


Thanks,
Oleg

[Gostev]

If you want to have an immutable copy of your recent backups in S3, then you have to enable the Copy policy on your Capacity Tier.

However, you cannot granularly pick and choose which backups to copy to S3, it's all or nothing.

[Daniel2]

Yep, Oleg's suggestions does not really work for us. We now understand how aging out and the move to the capacity tier works. But now we have half of a backup chain on object storage and half of it on our iSCSI-LUN.

Basically what we need is to copy certain full backups (without incrementals) to our immutable object storage and keep them there for a certain amount of time. Then they should be deleted.

As I understand, this is NOT POSSIBLE with Veeam 11?

[Gostev]

Export Backup functionality allows you to create a standalone full backup from any restore point, and attach a custom retention to it. Once created, this full will be the subject to the Capacity Tier policies (Copy and/or Move). For example, with the Copy policy, it can be immediately copied to the object storage, thus fulfilling your requirement. Does this work?

Note that exported backups will not take any physical space on the on-prem storage if you use ReFS or XFS.

[Daniel2]

Maybe it works, but manual or scripted procedures are non-compliant. The solution must be restored with a configuration restore. In other words: only built-in functionality is allowed.

We could create a second job and just create only full backups every month in conjunction with the capacity tier SOBR. That would work, but doing one full backup does already take up quite some time. And we don't have have an additional 20 TB storage for a duplicate full backup.

Edit: Trying to ask in a different way: is it possible to create a synthetic full backup that will NOT start a new incremental chain?

[Gostev]

is it possible to create a synthetic full backup that will NOT start a new incremental chain?

That's exactly what Export Backup does.

[Daniel2]

But it can't be configured as a job that runs automatically, which is a requirement.

[veremin]

Only via PowerShell, but as I've understood this is not an option for you. In this case your approach with additional job doing only monthly full backups should be a way to go. Thanks!