GFS Monthly Active Full Backup

[rjwolf82]

I'm trying to understand how I'm able to use short-term retention policy and long-term retention policy (GFS) with only Veeam Agent for Windows.

Example:

We have a Windows Server with retention policy of 30 days for the (default) short term policy. We don't use Active/Synthetic Full backup.

I want to create a monthly Active Full backup and keep each Full backup for let's say 6 months as part of archival purposes.

What I did was edit the existing backup job, enabled Active Full backup checkbox, configured to backup monthly on first day of the month.

I' ve enabled 'Keep certain ful backups longer for archival purposes' and chose Keep monthly full backups for' and I put in 6 months.
I've checked ' Use weekly full backup for the following week of a month and I've selected 'First'.

I've read the knowledge base regarding GFS but I still don't understand, https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agent ... tml?ver=50

-If a GFS flag is assigned to a full backup file in an active backup chain, the following applies:

Veeam Agent cannot transform the backup chain according to the short-term retention policy
Veeam Agent is not able to merge data from incremental backup files into the full backup file

What I don't want is that monthly Full backup will cause issues with the daily backup, can someone explain in the example above what will happen regarding transform/merge, so I can understand if this is what I want?

Thanks in advance.

[HannesK]

Hello,
the two sentences mean, that there are no merges (I assume these sentences exist, because the old backup copy job in VBR worked different).

What I don't want is that monthly Full backup will cause issues with the daily backup,

no worries It behaves the same like VM-based backup with VBR and monthly active full. You get up to 60 increments (because all the increments older than the second full depend on the first full).

Best regards,
Hannes

[rjwolf82]

Hi Hannes,

If we enable Active Full each month in the same backup job as daily backup then it will create new Full each month, that means new backup chain, with 29 incrementals.
After the new backup chain is complete Veeam will delete the first backup chain.

Let's say we create an extra backup job and configure to only backup every month, so each first day of the month we want a Full backup and with GFS option we select keep 6 months.
The first Full backup starts August 1st and will be kept for 6 months, on September 1st the second Full backup wil be created and kept for 6 months, am I correct?

If the 6 months are expired for a Full Backup it will be automatically deleted by Veeam Agent for Windows?

[HannesK]

Hello,
it will delete the first backup chain once there are enough restore points to fulfill the requirement of 30 days. That means something around 60 days because the old increments rely on the old full (I recommend using a pen and paper and draw fulls and increments to see the dependencies).

You can, but I recommend using one job. Everything else is making it overly complex.

Expiration is the same concept for full and increments: they are deleted when the time is over. Once the backup for the 7th month is successful, the oldest monthly backup gets deleted (and you have 6 monthlies as configured).

Best regards,
Hannes

[rjwolf82]

Hi Hannes,

Thanks for the explanation, you recommend using one job, but apart from the 'complexity' are there any other reasons to choose one job?
Because we prefer to use a separate backup job for the Monthly backups, so it only creates a Full backup each month without having Incrementals created after a new Full Backup has been created.

[HannesK]

disk space usage / costs prevents most customers from having two jobs. Also the double load on the production is a show stopper depending on the size.

Actually I don't know any reason why I would go with two jobs