Using the same Full backup on 2 different jobs

[alav]

Hi everyone,

I have a little... complication on my insfrastructure. I got a new infrastructure with VBR and the solution that our partner sold to my company (before I took the topic), is a combinaison of file backup.
to give you the contexte :
- some vm has to be saved 4 times a day and other one daily.
- retention for the first batch is 14 days and the second one is 30 days
- vm on the first batch have to be included on the second batch

and what it's a big issue for me, is that our Veeam partner (and Veeam Sales......) talked about possibility to configure the second job to include the vm from the first job (ok), but have only one full backup file for both.

For me that's not possible. Each task have this own backup. And the size of ou storage is very impacted because we have several full backup for the same VM because include in different job and the cost increase terribly indeed. we already have deduplication enabled on our StoreOnce, but we already added storage because the original sizing was not realistic

so, someone have an idea of how to optimize it or a way to do the concept that they sold ?

The first part in the schema is what we have right now, and the second one what our Veeam Partner sold to my company.

[david.domask]

Hi alav,

>For me that's not possible. Each task have this own backup.

You would be correct. Each job will maintain its own backup chain and will not be able to share a single full backup file between two separate jobs.

> - retention for the first batch is 14 days and the second one is 30 days

More or less, enabling GFS can assist here. With GFS, the job will mark full backups the job produces as GFS points and retain them longer than the short-term retention as per your settings, giving you long term and short term retention for the backups.

> And the size of ou storage is very impacted because we have several full backup for the same VM because include in different job and the cost increase terribly indeed. we already have deduplication enabled on our StoreOnce

Just out of curiosity, are you using encryption on the backups being sent to the Storeonce? Deduplicating appliances cannot effectively dedup encrypted files, and it's typically recommended to use the storage's own encryption for at-rest encryption. I'm not sure how much total data you're backing up to the Storeonce, but I would anticipate you get pretty decent deduplication ratios on full backups at least, especially of the same machine.

[alav]

about dedup, we used 200GB on the storeOnce for 1.1PB of backup data. Not bad
No encryption on the job.

GFS was a problem for us, we stay - at the beggining - with a short immuability period to identifiy how many storage we will need, especialy because this concept and design. And GFS don't care of immuability configuration and nor Veeam or HPE would be able to elimate data that we want to clean up and affected by the GFS. If the backup is 8 weeks old, the immuability 14 days and GFS 12 weeks, you can't do anything.that's not what I expected, and as a teammate want to try it, sooo... one year after, I always have useless data.

But, I could use it and separate my job, stay with each vm in here own job, but GFS don't let me stay with 14 days with 4 backup, and only one during the next 14 days, and finally a full for each week.
In addition, we continue to use Tape, and managing different job with only one tape, is quite woried I think In my actual scenario, the job which contain all vm can be do the job easily. no need to plan the start after a specific hour or day or... to have all previous job finished and be sure to have all data. (I'm not a big fan of tape)

[david.domask]

>about dedup, we used 200GB on the storeOnce for 1.1PB of backup data. Not bad

Indeed, not bad at all

> If the backup is 8 weeks old, the immuability 14 days and GFS 12 weeks, you can't do anything.that's not what I expected, and as a teammate want to try it, sooo... one year after, I always have useless data.

Understood, this is expected with GFS as outlined here in the User Guide, the greater time period for immutability is taken.

If I get your need right, you want to have normal retention + a full backup weekly, but you don't want the full backup immutable for the entire time period?

Export Backup might be a solution for you here -- regrettably it's not a scheduled job, but you could automate it with a Powershell script for example; Export Backup is useful because it let's you set custom retention for the Exported Backup and it works entirely on the repository so no additional workload on production.

[alav]

Yes, concerning retention, it's something like that

Huumm, Export backup could be a solution, but done some additional step. have to think about it.