Weekly Full Backups to Tape

[RWeiss]

Hello everyone

Even though I have seen similar questions in other threads, I decided to create a new one to not hijack other topics with my issues.
We would like to do the following
- Various Backup Jobs (Incremental) with active fulls every month. We would also do synthetic fulls but we would need to do them weekly - however, we do not want a full backup stored every week which would blow up the size unnecesarily.
- Tape Backups run every day but here we would like to have a weekly full

We used Backup Copy jobs before with rotating drives - it worked perfectly there. Every week when the drive was rotated, Veeam started a new, completely separate backup chain on the new drive. We would like exactly the same behaviour just with Tapes. From what I see, however, the Tapes only create a virtual full backup if you do not use active full backups.

So essentially I have two questions:

1. Is it possible to schedule synthetic full backups on a monthly cadence instead of weekly in 'normal' backup jobs?
2. How do I configure tape jobs such that they create a new full backup chain every week, independent of how the referenced backup job is scheduled?

[Dima P.]

Hello RWeiss,

1. Is it possible to schedule synthetic full backups on a monthly cadence instead of weekly in 'normal' backup jobs?

Sure. For forever incremental backup job type you can define the synthetic full backup schedule for tape jobs at Media Pool for Full Backups step of the wizard, click Schedule button to set the desired time of full backup creation for the tape jobs.

2. How do I configure tape jobs such that they create a new full backup chain every week, independent of how the referenced backup job is scheduled?

Same for forever forward incremental backup jobs - by changing the schedule of the synthesized full backup. For source jobs with periodic full backup unfortunately that's not going to work, so you need to match the tape schedule with the full backup creation on disk. Cheers!