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ITMIDCITY
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Using Reverse Incrementals with Backup Exec Tape

Post by ITMIDCITY »

Hey guys,

We have been running on veeam for quite some time and I have been doing daily tape backups of our Reverse Incremental jobs from veeam following this strategy: http://ict-freak.nl/2009/08/20/veeam-ba ... e-by-side/

I need to do weekly and monthly to tape backups now as well so I wanted to confirm the way I am going about it will work before testing. Here is our scenario:

I have veeam doing backups to a Freenas "SAN" through cfs shares. It stores up to 30 reverse incrementals with the latest obviously being the full backup. After each job is run it fires off the daily write to tape in backup exec 12.5 (as described in the link above). I have the selection criteria set in backup exec to grab the very last .vbk file and write that to the appropriate tape. Now I would like to have this happen on the weekend for weekly and monthly and was trying to do this simply by firing off a scheduled job for each vm that will just have a set time that it runs I.E. at 8am saturday morning and grabs the selection for the VM in backup exec so that it gets the latest full .vbk file. Hopefully this makes sense and if not I will try to explain further.

Can you think of any pitfalls this might have? I am setting up the jobs now and will begin testing next week.

Thanks!
Vitaliy S.
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Re: Using Reverse Incrementals with Backup Exec Tape

Post by Vitaliy S. »

If I got you right you will be creating separate backup jobs and will schedule them using Windows Task Manager (to achieve the required retention policy) or "a scheduled job" is a some kind of script that checks the date of the VBK file and then decides whether to offload backup files to tape or not?
rbrambley
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Re: Using Reverse Incrementals with Backup Exec Tape

Post by rbrambley »

Wouldn't the simplest idea be to create a job in BE that backs up the Veeam .vbk files daily, every Saturday, and last Saturday of the month (for example)? It's been a while, but I remember a schedule was possible like that from a single BE job. Otherwise you could create 3 separate jobs in BE - nightly, weekly, monthly. No need to to create multiple jobs in Veeam to accomplish the desired RPO archival to tape.

You really don't even need to configure the post job activity check box in Veeam. BE has it's own scheduler. If your Veeam jobs seem to take unpredictable amounts of time then I guess you still need it so that BE doesn't try to run while Veeam is still running. Or you could set a job window in Veeam and schedule BE to run during the times Veeam does not.

You could even save some space on your backup repository and drop the restore points to 7 in your Veeam jobs, because you are doing daily .vbk backups. Most people will archive the .vbk and the chain of .vrbs weekly (every Saturday). This way you have the last 7 on disk, every week on tape, and then your chosen last day of month on tape (.vbk only). You are then using BE to maintain the desired retention policy on tape.

Finally, you said that you wanted to do this per VM. I guess you will have to have a separate Veeam job for each VM to accomplish? BE is configured to backup the respective file sets of each job as decribed above. Not exactly the most efficient way to administrate Veeam and reduce your backup storage, but possible none the less.
rbrambley
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Re: Using Reverse Incrementals with Backup Exec Tape

Post by rbrambley »

rbrambley wrote: You could even save some space on your backup repository and drop the restore points to 7 in your Veeam jobs, because you are doing daily .vbk backups. Most people will archive the .vbk and the chain of .vrbs weekly (every Saturday). This way you have the last 7 on disk, every week on tape, and then your chosen last day of month on tape (.vbk only). You are then using BE to maintain the desired retention policy on tape.
You should actually change to 6 restore points for this > 1 .vbk + 6 .vrbs = 7 restore points
ITMIDCITY
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Re: Using Reverse Incrementals with Backup Exec Tape

Post by ITMIDCITY »

rbrambley wrote:Wouldn't the simplest idea be to create a job in BE that backs up the Veeam .vbk files daily, every Saturday, and last Saturday of the month (for example)? It's been a while, but I remember a schedule was possible like that from a single BE job. Otherwise you could create 3 separate jobs in BE - nightly, weekly, monthly. No need to to create multiple jobs in Veeam to accomplish the desired RPO archival to tape.
Yes you are correct here. What I ended up doing was setting up a "Policy" in backup exec which allows you to apply templates to it. For Example: I created a Veeam Media Rotation Policy. In that I created 2 templates. One for weekly backups run on the 2nd,3rd,4th, and 5th Sunday of the month and then a Monthly Template to run on the 1st sunday of the month. You set up all your parameters in the template as far as the backups go and then you can create your jobs based on the policy so it is all tied together. Sadly the test didn't work this weekend as the jobs somehow got put on hold :roll: I think it was user error ha ha.
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