V11 back-up copy quarterly back-up

[Erwin Linker]

Hello,

I did a test upgrade in our test enviroment, when i install V11 RTM i get a message that de quarterly back-up is no longer provided. This is a feature that we are using for different customers, is there a way to get it back? Have a customer that wants 4 quarterly back-ups that will now be converted to 12 month back-ups, so there is a big differents in storage consumption for the customer.

Regards,
Erwin Linker

[andrie]

There was a blog post on the veeam site explaining the change but it was removed: https://www.veeam.com/blog/new-gfs-retention-v11.html
I wonder what's up with this. Why was the blog post removed?
Some of our cumstomers need quarterly copies too so any details on this change would be helpful.

[Gostev]

It had some technical mistakes that needed corrections. I asked not to publish without my review again, but I need to finish some more urgent stuff that was already in the pipeline, which has to deal with the v11 launch first.

But you won't really learn much/anything new from the blog post. In short: if you're familiar with how GFS retention works in primary backup jobs, then you know everything you need about v11. Literally the same logic and the same code is now also used also for GFS retention in Backup Copy jobs (time-based + no merges + no quarterlies).

[Gostev]

This is a feature that we are using for different customers, is there a way to get it back? Have a customer that wants 4 quarterly back-ups that will now be converted to 12 month back-ups, so there is a big differents in storage consumption for the customer.

No way to get it back: it's now the same as GFS retention for primary jobs, which did not have quarterly backups since inception.

What you can do:

1. Use XFS, ReFS, object storage or dedupe appliance for GFS archives. This way those few extra monthlies will not impact disk space usage significantly.

2. Reduce/remove quarterly retention. When we discussed this with customers two years ago, everyone who chimed in chosen no quarterly backups (scroll up to see all comments). Neither there was much demand after v10 launch, even if now when we already close to 700K downloads.

3. Don't upgrade to v11. If there's a major demand, we can always implement quarterlies in a future update.

[christiankelly]

Gostev, we may be an outlier, but we used quarterlies extensively as part of our 1y and 7y retention plans. #1 doesn't address moving data to blob storage or "appliances" that weren't designed for ReFS (memory/CPU) and #2 won't work for clients that want longer retentions.

I'd be interested in your "big data" analysis of how many backup copy jobs had quarterlies as part of the job. I'm sure you ran those numbers and it must have been a very small number to drop the feature?

Are there others that are stuck with this issue?

Thanks,

[Gostev]

#1 doesn't address moving data to blob storage or "appliances" that weren't designed for ReFS (memory/CPU)

Hi, Christian. Can you clarify this please? We support blob storage (it is included under "object storage" in my reply) and ReFS does not have any special CPU/memory requirements these days.

[christiankelly]

Sorry if I wasn't clear.

For blob storage, we'll now need 12x monthlies vs 4x quarterlies to keep 1-year retention. So higher costs for the same result.

As for CPU/MEM, I think it's fair to say that ReFS with dedupe needs more CPU/RAM per TB than NTFS, at least that's our understanding. So not a Veeam requirement as much as an MS/Veeam together requirement?

Thanks,

[Gostev]

Are you're talking about Azure blob storage? If yes, remember full backups are not stored as standalone fulls in object storage (as your calculation implies), since we only upload unique blocks not already present in the cloud.

By the way, you should also consider these alternative ways of storing 4x quarterlies:
a) 9x monthlies and 1 yearly, as opposed to 12 monthlies.
b) In case you're talking Azure, you can further offload monthlies to Azure Archive Storage, which is a few times cheaper.

Anyway, I understand it is not ideal comparing to having quarterlies. Removing them was a necessity driven by a switch to the primary job GFS logic, not anyone's desire. We can always implemented quarterlies again, if there's a lot of demand.

If you're talking about Windows deduplication, then it is actually a shared engine between NTFS and ReFS, so exact same requirements.

[christiankelly]

Thanks as always for the thoughtful responses Gostev.

I think we'll be good long term, sad to see them go, but I think the workarounds aren't too bad.

[JosVerhallen]

Hello,

I would like to know what VEEAM's motivation was to remove quarterly backups from the GFS backup structure.

Kind regards,

Jos Verhallen

[Natalia Lupacheva]

Hi Jos,

I've moved your post. to the existing thread with the discussions on the quarterly GFS backups.
Please review the thread above and the suggested blogpost.

Thanks!

[TitaniumCoder477]

We also use quarterlies to spread out protection across a full year while consuming as little space as possible on non-deduplicated or ReFS/XFS repositories. So I guess this is three service providers now that have run into this removal of capability.

[roaima]

Hello,

I'm currently running VBR version 10 and considering the upgrade to version 11. My backup flow is as follows,

• Backups of production to on-site Windows server (for relatively fast minor restore requirements)
• Twice daily copies of backups to off-site Windows server. Veeam is managed from this location
• Weekly copy of backups to a Linux-based server in another off-site location.

At step 3, I also GFS yearly and quarterly backups (no monthlies due to space constraints). An example set of dates (with a gap in the chronology, yes, I know) is thus,

Code: Select all

Data    Backup  Dedup   Compr   Date    Retention
9G      6G      1.1x    1.3x    7-Dec
27G     20G     1.1x    1.2x    30-Nov
8G      5G      1.2x    1.3x    22-Oct
80G     70G     1.0x    1.1x    15-Oct  *R*
80G     68G     1.1x    1.1x    8-Jul   *Q*
60G     53G     1.0x    1.1x    7-Apr   *Q*
60G     59G     1.0x    1.1x    5-Jan   *QY*

Reading https://www.veeam.com/blog/v11-gfs-retention.html it's clear that I'm going to lose my quarterly full backups. The underlying filesystem on this Linux-based server is ext4. Underneath this VM server is Proxmox with ZFS, so I get some compression but no deduplication. Switching from ext4 to XFS at this stage is not an option for a reasonably full 12TB partition.

If I switch to Monthly fulls I'll end up with considerably more disk used - on my larger server backups so much so that it's going to significantly impact my ability to run any sensible level of backups/archives at all. Incrementals change often enough that I do need a Full every so often.

At the moment losing Quarterly level GFS full backups is such a show-stopper that I don't see how I can upgrade from v10 to v11.

Any other suggestions, please?

Thanks
Chris

[Natalia Lupacheva]

Hi Chris,

I've moved your post to the existing thread with the discussions about GFS on v11 to keep similar questions together.
Please take a look at the replies here, might help.

Thanks!