Design question

[Hans]

Hi Veeam

I'm all new to Veeam but have watching some of your videos which is great by the way.

I have a question about a customer setup that I would like you opinion on.
The customer has the following
VMware vSphere Essentials Kit
Veeam Backup Essentials
Three USB hard drives that is going to be used for backup with Veeam.
1 esxi 5.1 host hosting three virtual machines.
Backups will be taken Monday to Friday.

My question is how would you set this up?
Here is my own thoughts.

- One Veeam backup job that make a Full Backup (Reversed Incremental) every night to one of the USB hard drives. The next morning the USB hard drive is taken offsite and replaced by a new USB drive.
- Five Veeam backup jobs doing Full Backup(Reversed Incremental) to USB. The next morning the USB hard drive is taken offsite and replaced by a new USB drive.

What are your thoughts?

Kind Regards
Hans Chr. Andersen

[foggy]

Hans, there's no need to create multiple jobs, one reversed incremental job with retention policy set to keep 1 restore point on disk is sufficient. Thus you will have a full backup copied to the USB drive every week day. Just don't forget to specify the ForceCreateMissingVBK registry key to enable rotated drives scenario. Thanks.

[Hans]

Thanks Alexander

So I just create one job and then every morning change the USB drive which will create a new full backup one the USB drive.
So when I set retention policy to 1 i guess I'll only have 3 backups in total and will never get backup more backup copies with this setup?

Kind Regards
Hans Chr. Andersen

[veremin]

It depends on the number of USB drives you’re going to rotate. Assuming that there are three of them, then, yes, with the aforesaid scenario, you will have 3 backup copies. Though, as far as I know, having 1 as a retention policy might sometimes lead to unexpected consequences, especially, during the retry operation. So, in order to be on the safe, it’s recommended to have at least 2 as number of restore points.

Thanks.