Full backup to tape

[late]

Hi,

How should I approach a scenario where retention period for backup job is set to 2 weeks and I would like to copy only weekly active fulls to tape? The active fulls will be created on Saturday. Is it possible to copy only those fulls from disk to tape and leave out the incrementals?

Thanks

[veremin]

Am I right in assuming that source backup job is using forward incremental mode?

[late]

Hi Vladimir,

Yes that is correct. Sorry for leaving that out

[veremin]

- Create a media pool and make sure that it has retention longer than 2 weeks
- Add a backup to tape job, selecting the backup job as it source
- Uncheck "process incremental" option
- Set it to run on Saturday (either Daily -> On these days -> Saturday or "as new backup files appear"

Thanks.

[kappa85]

I apologize if this isn't the right thread to post in, but I think I am in a similar scenario. We come from Backup Exec, writing incremental backups daily, with a full on saturday, following a GFS strategy (at the moment we keep 4 months).
We are now switching to virtual with veeam, and we'd like to mantain more or less the same strategy, taking tapes offsite once a week. Our backup-to-disk job have different retention based on the role (for example, sql vm have 1 month retention on disk, with 4 full each month and incremental everyday... while other virtual machines have only one week retention with 1 full and incremental everyday). What is the correct configuration of tape jobs to reach our goal?

[veremin]

Do you want to preserve similar retention scheme on tapes? 4 months for SQL, 1 week for other VMs, etc.?

[kappa85]

Do you want to preserve similar retention scheme on tapes? 4 months for SQL, 1 week for other VMs, etc.?

No, all job should write to tape only the current VM state, so making a synthetic full will be enough. Otherwise I would have redundancy of data on tapes, it will be fine but I would need extra tapes.

[Shestakov]

Please consider using Virtual Full backup to get the most recent restore point on the tape. Note that you need the source job to be a backup copy job or backup job using forever incremental method.
Less resource consuming plan is to take the last Full backup on the tape. Could you specify your goal, please, do you want both increments and fulls on your tape or full backups only? Thanks.

[kappa85]

Less resource consuming plan is to take the last Full backup on the tape. Could you specify your goal, please, do you want both increments and fulls on your tape or full backups only? Thanks.

You got the point, I only want a full backup on tape (I mean with data updated to the moment I perform backup on tape).

[Shestakov]

If your goal is to copy only the latest point every time, I`d suggest to use reverse incremental backup method for the source backup job, so the newest backup will always be a full. Then you can set a backup copy job to copy only full backups. Once you run it, the most recent .Vbk will be copied to the tape. Thanks.