Best way (storage-wise) to have a backup of 6 months ago

[Thomas_VDB]

Hi,
We have configured B&R to keep 7 restore points of our backup job.
This backup is then also copied to an immutable repo via a backup copy job.
So in case of an incident, we can roll back to about a week ago.

However, it sometimes happens that we want to roll back an individual file or folder to
half a year ago. So we'd need to have a backup from then.

What would be the best way (storage efficiency) to have data available from about half a year ago.
(We don't want to have restore points per day/week/month up to half a year ago).
First idea was to make a second backup job that runs every six months, and keeps 2 backups.
So I'd always have a backup of minumum 6 months ago. Or are there better ways? E.g. that for the
daily backups and the 6-monthly backups, there is only 1 full backup?

[Mildur]

Hi Thomas

If your immutable repository is a hardened repository with XFS filesystem, you can enable monthly GFS backup copies. Repositories backed by reFS or XFS will provide good storage efficiency to store synthetic monthly full backups. We will use our own FastClone feature to leverage block cloning from those two file systems. This allows us to create almost space less synthetic fulls.

If you don't want to create image level backups for just a few files, you may also check out NAS backup jobs to backup a specific Share or folder on your file server. Protecting only a few important folders could require less space than protecting the entire server. Could, because depending on the type of files and how many of them are changed between backup jobs it could mean you require more space than protecting just a changed block with a image level backup.

Best,
Fabian

[Thomas_VDB]

thx! I'll have a look!