wasabi immutability and reverse

[infraengineer2023]

Hi
I'm looking at setting up Veeam using Wasabi as our cloud storage, can you do reverse incremental with immutability turned on?
My understanding is if immutability is turned on, once you have backed up the VM/file share, you can not add any further changes to that file for the amount of time that was set for immunability

Am I correct?

[Mildur]

Hello Infraengineer2023

Welcome to the forum.

May I ask, why you need a reverse incremental backup chain? What's the use case?

Direct to Object storage backups are Forever Forward Incremental Backup chains with the option to enable periodic active full backups. And there are no backup files on object storage. We upload unique blocks belonging to a restore point as objects to the object storage repository. This allows us to restore single guest OS files without downloading an entire backup chain first. We only need to read a few objects belonging to the restored file.

My understanding is if immutability is turned on, once you have backed up the VM/file share, you can not add any further changes to that file for the amount of time that was set for immutability

Correct. All uploaded objects belonging to a restore point are immutable for the period you have set on the repository. Objects belonging to a GFS restore points are immutable for the entire GFS retention period.
There is no reason to change the content of those objects after they were uploaded. The only operation which is done is to extend the immutability period if the object still belongs to newer restore points.

Best,
Fabian

[infraengineer2023]

We use reverse incremental backup, so we always have one complete backup, and then each day an incremental backup is made, is this possible with immutability turned on?

[Mildur]

Thank you for explaining. There is no full backup file in object storage repositories.

But the same goal can be achieved with Forever Forward Incremental backups. Immutability is fully supported with object storage repositories.
First backup will upload a full backup as unique objects. In subsequent backup sessions, only new and changed data will be offload as unique objects to object storage.

Best,
Fabian

[infraengineer2023]

Hi

Thank you, is there any instructions on how to set up "But the same goal can be achieved with Forever Forward Incremental backups. "

Thanks

[Mildur]

For backup copies directly to Wasabi (available with Veeam Backup & Replication v12):

1) Create a bucket on Wasabi with "Bucket Versioning" and "Object Locking" enabled:
https://docs.wasabi.com/docs/object-locking-enable

2) Add Wasabi as a backup repository with immutability enabled:
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120

2) Point your backup copy job (or backup job) to that repository:
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120

It just works. No special configuration required.
I recommend to only use a backup copy job. Use a local repository for your primary backup jobs.

Best,
Fabian

[Gostev]

Depending on your environment size, I would also recommend you to consider using a scale-out backup repository instead of two separate jobs (primary backup jobs on-prem + backup copy job to Wasabi). Deploying SOBR bring many additional technical benefits which you will find important down the road, but it will be much harder for you to redeploy and move to SOBR then.