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hatrick
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Offsite Monthly Backups

Post by hatrick »

So we currently run reverse incremental backups daily with 32 day VM retention period. As part of this same job we are running Active Full Backups on Saturday. We would like to try and create a rotation where we can recover anything for a month and then recover anything for the prior year from a full monthly backup. What we are doing would basically work but we are limited on the amount of space that we are doing the daily backups to to retain a years worth on Monthly fulls as they are ~1TB each. We had been manually copying the weekly .vbk files to another offsite disk array but to recover anything we needed to import the 1TB file which took the better part of a day. Is it possible to have the daily backup we have to one array and do a monthly full backup to another array? Both locations are seen as repositories within Veeam. There are two things that are confusing me. If we create a replication job we will get everything that we have in the daily location and we only want the monthly .vbk files. If I create a seperate monthly backup there does not appear to be such a thing as a full backup. It wants me to create a incremental or reverse incremental job. Any help appreciated.

Thanks
veremin
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Re: Offsite Monthly Backups

Post by veremin »

hatrick wrote:If I create a seperate monthly backup there does not appear to be such a thing as a full backup. It wants me to create a incremental or reverse incremental job. Any help appreciated.
In this case, I would strongly recommend you to use "VM Copy" functionality in order to create monthly backup. With a VM copy job, you can create a fully-functioning copy of a VM that will require no manual editing and adjustments. Just as backup and replication jobs, a VM copy job can be performed using the Direct SAN Access, Virtual Appliance and Network transport modes, supports VSS options, can be run on demand or scheduled. All you need is just to click “Home” button and then choose “VM Copy”.

Thanks.
hatrick
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Re: Offsite Monthly Backups

Post by hatrick »

So with the VM Copy jobs are these then restore points available when performing a restore without needing to import?
dellock6
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Re: Offsite Monthly Backups

Post by dellock6 »

Mike, the VM copy only creates the copy of the VM at the time you run it, no further restore points available, nore they would be available when copy a single VBK file like you are doing now. And yes, with VM Copy you have the vmdk and vmx files directly available, without the need to first open vbk to extract them.
As a cons, VM Copy does not give you compression nor deduplication, so the resulting backup is bigger in size than VBK.

Luca.
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Vitaliy S.
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Re: Offsite Monthly Backups

Post by Vitaliy S. »

hatrick wrote:If I create a seperate monthly backup there does not appear to be such a thing as a full backup. It wants me to create a incremental or reverse incremental job. Any help appreciated.
Actually, you can select reversed incremental backup mode, choose to perform active full on monthly basis and then schedule your job to run only once a month. In this case your backup job will be scheduled to run once a month and will always perform active full backup of your production VMs.

BTW- we've got an existing topic that explains how to achieve the same goal with a PowerShell script: Monthly Full backups

Hope this helps!
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