Daily Disk to Tape best practice

[jfnk1ng]

Hi.

We are currently backing up a number of VMs daily to disk, using a Forward Incremental chain, and are in the process of implementing a tape server so we can copy the backups to tape each day for offsite.

We would like the daily tape backup to be a full backup of the environment, but of course at the moment the Veeam job creates an incremental backup each day (and a synthetic full once a week). In order to achieve our aim do we need to change to Reverse Incremental or is there some "Veeam magic" that would create a full backup on the tape each day but leave the disk backup as-is (don't want additional fulls on the disk storage of course, due to space).

Would changing to reverse incremental be an issue, in terms of "best practice"? The backup jobs are configured to use Veeam's compression and deduplication, so there is no overhead on the storage device itself in that regard (which I know would be a strong indication against moving to Reverse). Are there any other considerations, or arguments for or against changing to reverse incremental in this case.

Thanks

[veremin]

There are two options:

* switch to reversed incremental mode and let backup to tape job archive the latest restore point (.vbk) daily
* switch to forward forever incremental mode by disabling periodic full backup and let backup to tape job synthesize virtual full backup on tapes daily

Thanks.

[jfnk1ng]

Thanks Vladimir

I think reverse incremental sounds the more appealing of the two, so long as there are no significant downsides (?). Obviously going to make the disk backup process longer (any idea how much longer, as a %), while it "injects" the incremental into the .vbk, but equally I can imagine that having the tape job synthesise a virtual full backup each night (from the on-disk .vbk file and subsequent .vib's - 14 at the moment) would make that longer too. Also, the chances are that if we ever have to restore a server it would be from the disk backup, so it would be nice to have a recent full available on the disk.

That said, if I went for option 2, how would I set the tape job to synthesise a virtual full backup on the tape only?

I suppose the quickest overall disk>disk>tape backup would be to continue with the current config and send the resulting backup chain to tape as-is without creating a vbk each time, either on disk or tape. The downside being that a restore from tape would be slower as it would have to process the vbk and the vibs.

Have I missed/misunderstood anything I need to consider?

Thanks
Jeremy

[jfnk1ng]

Hi

Just thinking a bit more about forward forever v reverse incremental. Would I be right in thinking that in both cases the backup injects an incremental into the vbk? That is, Reverse incremental injects the most recent incremental, and forward forever injects the oldest incremental (assuming it has reached the retention threshold). In that case, can I assume both disk backups would take the same length of time?

Thanks
Jeremy

[veremin]

I think reverse incremental sounds the more appealing of the two, so long as there are no significant downsides (?)

It puts additional load on target repository, but you should be OK, as long as the repository can cope with it.

Also, the chances are that if we ever have to restore a server it would be from the disk backup, so it would be nice to have a recent full available on the disk.

Restore point type (full, incremental) should not significantly affect restore time.

That said, if I went for option 2, how would I set the tape job to synthesise a virtual full backup on the tape only?

Select every day for virtual full backup creation (backup to tape job settings).

Thanks.