7 years retention strategy..

[sirhideo]

I know this has been discussed in the forum for couple times but I am still very confused about how to setup the jobs, here is the requirements.

1) the source daily backup job of all vms has a 2 months retention period. In this job, every Monday has a full backup so the entire rotation has 8 chains on disk.
2) On the last Saturday of every month, there will be a full backup which contains the entire month backup (I guess this is synthetic full?)
3) the entire month of the data needs to send to tape and archive for 7 years

Yes, every single file inside vm needs to be kept for 7 years.

I have 2 confusion and need some education here..

1) which full backup should I use, active or synthetic on every monday for source daily backup job?
2) Since the source daily backup rotates every 2 months (retention policy 62 days). If the synthetic backup happens on last Saturday of every month for the preparation of tape job, does the 2nd month synthetic full contain 2 months data? If so, the data on the tape would look like below

Jan 31 Synthetic -> contains Jan1-Jan31 data
Feb 28 Synthetic -> contains Jan1-Feb28 data?
On Mar1, source backup starts to rotate, old restore points will be deleted daily
Mar31 synthetic -> contains Mar1-Mar31 data

Is this the case? If so how can I setup the jobs to fit the above requirement, where the tape, let say, contains 12 synthetic full, which has 365 days of restore points?

Thanks!
Hideo

[Mildur]

Hi Hideo

1) the source daily backup job of all vms has a 2 months retention period. In this job, every Monday has a full backup so the entire rotation has 8 chains on disk.
2) On the last Saturday of every month, there will be a full backup which contains the entire month backup (I guess this is synthetic full?)

Depends on your backup job settings and if you use object storage repository or not for your job. Default for non-object storage repositories is weekly synthetic full on Saturday. I assume you have manually enabled Active Full for the last Saturday in the month together with the default option

1) which full backup should I use, active or synthetic on every monday for source daily backup job?

Doesn't matter for your tape job. If you use reFS/XFS filesystem, synthetic fulls should be used for FastClone aware full backups. Active Full cannot use FastClone.

2) Since the source daily backup rotates every 2 months (retention policy 62 days). If the synthetic backup happens on last Saturday of every month for the preparation of tape job, does the 2nd month synthetic full contain 2 months data? If so, the data on the tape would look like below

1x synthetic full contains a point-in-time state of your protected VM. A synthetic full doesn't contain every daily backup.
You have the vbk file which is the full backup. A vib file contains an incremental backup for the VM of the day it was created.

Yes, every single file inside vm needs to be kept for 7 years.

May I ask, do you need a point-in-time state of your VM or any file created or edited in that month? If a File gets created on Day 1 and deleted on Day 5, it won't be on Tape if you only write the full from the end of month to a tape. You must write the entire backup chain from your daily backups to that tape. You can use a File To Tape job for it. But even then, you will only have daily states of your VMs. Files created in the morning and deleted after lunch on the same day won't be in the backup.

Best,
Fabian