Quarterly backups using hard drives and keeping the 4th quarter for 5 years

[Jeremy6249]

Hello,

Currently we have our backups jobs backup to our main repository on the Veeam server using direct attached storage. We also have copy jobs that copy over to a secondary site to a repository there.

We're wanting to have quarterly backups that we will rotate the hard drives out every quarter and keep in our safety deposit box until the quarter next year where that drive will be used once again. Also the 4th quarter drive will be kept for 5 years. I've looked at GFS and making a repository that uses rotated drives. I take it GFS won't work for this situation and I'll need to do this with rotated drives?

With some testing I've done it fills a 12TB drive in a few days, I haven't tried swapping in another drive to see if it does the same thing or if it takes long to fill it up.

How I can implement this with Veeam?

What limitations are there if any?

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums.

As you want to rotate the drives, the "rotated drives" option you already found is correct. Also mentioned in the limitations, GFS is incompatible with rotated drives.

With manually swapped / rotated drives, I would go for another backup copy job and run it "on demand" once per quarter.

Best regards,
Hannes

[Jeremy6249]

I will discuss that with my team. Is there anyway to have it ran automatically on a schedule?

Possibly even creating a backup copy job for monthly and then switching the drive out quarterly.

Looks like I would need to create 3 of these jobs, one for VM's, one for Agents and one for Linux in our situation. I take it there isn't a way to have one backup copy job do all 3?

If we decided to run a backup copy job monthly instead of just quarterly is there anything to consider?

Under the Target section in the backup copy job, how does the retention policy work since these will be rotated and we plan to keep the 4th quarter drive for 5 years? Does it need to be set for 1,825+ days? Veeam retention only goes up to 999 days

[HannesK]

yes, backup copy jobs can also be scheduled every 90 days if you prefer.

correct, that's three backup copy jobs for today.

For simplicity, I would just apply retention physically. Something hat is not attached to VBR cannot be deleted by VBR.

The retention policy works to whatever you set it do. Switching to restore points (instead of days) and doing the math manually would be the alternative. The question is, whether it's worth to think about it too much, because just keeping the 4th quarter disk "somewhere" and simply not attaching it anymore is much easier than thinking about "how many versions do I need".

[Jeremy6249]

I only see that I can schedule backup jobs for the every 90 days and not backup copy jobs.

[HannesK]

with periodic copy, it's on the first page: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110