Best configuration to get Daily, Monthly and Yearly backups copy to tape

[ajmayala85]

Hello Veeam forum

Veeam Case #07761785

We have jobs running vm backups to disk repository with 15 days for daily retention (just incremental backups with no synthetic fulls), we implemented backup copies to tape, A GFS media pool recently enabled with monthly and yearly media sets, for monthly tape copies is 12-month retention and annual tape copies with 5-year retention.

As a new company policy, daily backups are required to be copied from disk to tape also with 15-day retention. When enabling the Daily option in the GFS media pool, the following message appears:

"Retention in the daily media set is lower than the full backup frequency for an elder media set. Such a configuration may result in additional full backups being written to daily media sets." How does this impact daily retention and the number of tapes used?

What is the best option to implement daily backup copies to tape with 15-day retention, monthly tape jobs with 12-month retention, and annual tape jobs with 5-year retention?

Is it better to use a standard media pool for daily tape copies and a GFS media pool for monthly and annual tape copies?

We look forward to your comments.

Alan

[david.domask]

Hi Alan,

> "Retention in the daily media set is lower than the full backup frequency for an elder media set. Such a configuration may result in additional full backups being written to daily media sets." How does this impact daily retention and the number of tapes used?

Remember that with Tape, retention applies to the entire tape, so in practice, very little changes about your tape retention scheme.

However, periodically a full backup will be written to the daily media set. As noted in the User Guide, the Daily media set needs to refer to a Full backup in the Weekly media set, so if there isn't one to link the incremental backups to, a full backup will be placed in the Daily media set (if the source job doesn't produce periodic fulls, then the tape GFS job will create a Virtual Full backup directly on tape, no additional space on repository required)

As for best practice, it's however works best for you. Both GFS and Simple media pools will need that periodic full for the daily increments to link to, so I would just keep the GFS configuration and either enable the Weekly media set (1 restore point should be enough to avoid Fulls in the daily, but you may need 2), or simply let the fulls land in the Daily media set.

[ajmayala85]

Hello David,

Thanks for the feedback,

Veeam support is also recommends to use a standard media pool for daily backups using a virtual full and the GFS media pool for monthly and year backup copies.

Best regards

Alan