Monthly backups on tape (with recovery points)

[DavorS]

Hi, i have a client using Veeam B&R v7 - we do daily backups in reverse incremental mode and have 90 recovery points on disk. The company policy states they have to make monthly backups to tape, but they need to have the whole chain if they want to go back to a specific day.

If i make another reverse incremental job with 30 recovery points i guess it will copy only full backup and no rollbacks, right?
If the above statement is correct, i could make a forward incremental job with increment processing and schedule backup to tape every first saturday of the month - i would get one full backup and 29 increments for the first month, but what about all the months after?

If i set up that forward incremental job to do Synthetic full backups every first Sunday of the month, will it merge all the increments into one and delete the chain, or will i have one active full with 29 increments and one synthetic full?

[veremin]

If i make another reverse incremental job with 30 recovery points i guess it will copy only full backup and no rollbacks, right?

Yes, backup to tape job will copy only .vbk files.

i would get one full backup and 29 increments for the first month, but what about all the months after?

Backup to tape job will copy only "new" files - ones that have been copied to tape mediums previously.

If i set up that forward incremental job to do Synthetic full backups every first Sunday of the month, will it merge all the increments into one and delete the chain, or will i have one active full with 29 increments and one synthetic full?

The synthetic full will use the latest full backup and chain of subsequent increments to create a new full backup. Whether or not the previous chain will be purged depends on the retention settings. Please, see corresponding section of our User Guide for more information regarding synthetic full backup.

The company policy states they have to make monthly backups to tape, but they need to have the whole chain if they want to go back to a specific day.

You might want to put files to tape job into use. Being set to perform only "full" backups, the job will copy backup files to tapes once a month.

Thanks.

[mpjs]

Follow up on this.....Hi there, I also wanted to achieve the same result by making sure the full chain is backed up to tape. The work around for this, is to make sure that your Virtual Full Tape (synthesized to tape) job is scheduled to fall outside the job schedule. Example, schedule the virtual full for tape to only run in December no matter which day of December; when you reach December just change it to fall outside the schedule again by selecting a month that falls outside the backup chain. I think v9 will give you the ability, I hope to switch virtual full tape off as in a scenario where you want to process the entire change (VBKs and VBIs) it would make sense. As explained for the months other than December the virtual full is actually disabled if your chain doesn't contain the days of each month of the year..Hope I'm making sense. I'm assuming a backup copy job or forward incremental job where you keep at least 30 recovery points, when you run a monthly VM to tape job the entire chain will be processed and the virtual full won't be created as it is effectively not scheduled to run as it has been scheduled for December month only.

[veremin]

The workaround doesn't seem to be applicable here. Since the OP is about to run a forward incremental mode with periodic fulls, virtual full backup won't be even created in his case - no need to tweak its schedule whatsoever.

So, the backup to tape job scheduled to run once a month would give him what he is after - copy monthly worth backup chain to tape mediums.

Thanks.

[mpjs]

I believe the company policy requires a full chain to be on the monthly tape, hence my recommendation to disable the Virtual Full. By doing this, it would negate the need for Synthetic Fulls on Disk and save the disk space. Only store one full for the month on disk and subsequent increments, at the end of the month backup that entire chain when forever forward incremental is used.