Copy to tape vbk selection from backup copy job

[danielchung]

Currently I have 2 sets of backup job for servers in remote offices, one to local and one to central repository as offsite. The offsite backup jobs run Monday - Friday, forward incremental with synthetic full on Friday. Due to disk constrain, I only keep 10 restore points on disk. With this setup, a VBK file will be generated for each office every Friday, and I use BE 2010 to copy those VBK files to tape every Saturday. (by excluding *.vbk which have not been accessed for 2 days in selection list in BE2010)

In v7 testing, I'm going to test to use backup copy job to replace the current offsite backup job. So I created a backup copy job, keep 10 restore points and 2 weekly backups (on Friday). I found that the backup copy job will transform the backup chains when number of restore points exceeds. As mentioned in user guide, the backup copy job use the oldest incremental backup in transformation.

The problem is, once the number of restore points exceeded, a VBK file being transformed every day. On Friday, I will have 2 "new" VBK files, one is the oldest full backup in the backup chain of 10 restore points, and the other is the weekly backup. Then in BE2010, the currently selection will include both VBK files which I only need the weekly backup.

Anyone knows how to select the weekly backup files in BE2010? There are some powershell posted here, but BE2010 doesn't support powershell. One idea I can think of is adding pre-job in BE2010 to rename the VBK files (maybe adding prefix like "Weekly-xxxx") before copy to tape job and reverse back after job completed. Is that okay?

[foggy]

Daniel, you could do either this, or one of the following:
1. Change retention settings for the backup copy job so it keeps only one VBK file.
2. Create another backup copy job, specify the target repository of the first backup copy job as a source for it, and set it to create a single VBK file that will be offloaded to tape.
3. Install Veeam B&R v7 in your offsite location and utilize its file-to-tape job in conjunction with PowerShell according to this procedure to offload the latest VBK file to tape.

Hope this helps.

[veremin]

As to the latest .vbk, it can be found and copied with the following script:

Code: Select all

$LastVBK = Get-ChildItem $SourcePath\*.vbk| Sort-Object CreationTime -Descending | Select-Object -First 1| Get-ChildItem -name;
Robocopy $SourcePath $TargetPath $LastVBK;

Thanks.