Need to free up NAS space but keep tapes running v11

[craig.maxwell]

Hi

We backup our Hyper-V VMs to a NAS Daily using Forward Incremental and a 10-day Retention Policy.
Create Active Full Backups is set to every Saturday.
Keep Certain Full backups is set to 2 Months (First Week).
Secondary target is sent to Tape once a week.

Example of the VBK and VIB files for 1 of the VMs:
- 4x 1TB VBK files over the last month
- 1x 1TB VBK file from the previous month
- 10x 2GB VIB files over the 10 days

Our NAS has finally run out of space but we would prefer to change the backup frequency rather than upgrading the NAS.

What should we change to lessen the number of large VBK files, but still be able to send backups to Tape weekly?

Many thanks for any advice.

Craig

[HannesK]

Hello,
you could switch to GFS tape jobs and reduce the retention (maybe 2 weeks instead of 4 weeks). GFS tape jobs can create virtual synthetic full backups from incremental backups.

If the NAS is on the Windows Hardware catalog, you could also use REFS and iSCSI to reduce space usage (or XFS with Linux, but I guess that's out of scope). But you need temporary space for the migration. Probably that does not help you.

Best regards,
Hannes

[craig.maxwell]

Thank you for the help Hannes,

The retention policy is currently set to 10 days, if I lower that I'm not sure if it will free up much space.

I could try changing the "Create Active Full Backups" from Weekly to Monthly but then I'm not sure if the weekly Secondary to Tape will work?
Or I could drop the "Keep Monthly Full Backups" from 2 months to 1 month.

I will look into GFS to Tape, but I currently reuse the same 6 tapes in a weekly cycle as long-term 6 monthly archives are sent to another NAS.

Many Thanks

Craig

[HannesK]

Hello,
if you go for "monthly active full" with 10 days retention, then you will get around 40 increments + 2 full backups. I guess that takes more space than now. To really save space, all full backups could be removed (forward incremental forever backup)

Weekly GFS to tape works in the "monthly active full" scenario. The tape job will synthesize a full backup.

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ackup.html

Best regards,
Hannes