Here is what I have:
Hyper-V cluster with about 35 VMs. Veeam is installed on a member of the cluster with two volumes mapped via iSCSI and 10GB ethernet to two NAS devices. Each NAS has a single 36TB array formatted in ReFS. One volume for Daily backups and one volume to be used for Archival backups. Each VM has a backup job that runs 1x a day with 14 restore points. (I will probably up this to 30 restore points as I have lots of free space). Backups start each night around 6pm and end around 11pm. Synthetic full backups are created on Sundays and backup health checks run on Saturdays.
What i want:
To create backup copy jobs for each VM to retain a years worth of monthly backups and 7 years worth of yearly backups on my second NAS device. The monthly job should copy the last backup made from the month before. So the backup copy job that runs on Feb 1 should copy the backups made on Jan 31 to the archival backup location. The yearly backup job should run on Jan 1st and copy the backups from Dec 31 .
While this seems very simple, i can't figure out how to set this job up.
For example, what do i choose on the very first tab for the copy every setting? It says it controls how often backup copies are created so i would assume i would want to set this to every 30 days? however, since it doesn't give you a chance to pick when this starts maybe i should be setting it to every 1 day? How does this setting relate to the restore points to keep option? For example what would be the effect of setting this to every 1 day, restore points to 0, and keep additional restore points to 11 for months for 7 for years? Vs setting copy to every 30 days, restore points to 11, and keep additional points to 0 for everything but 7 years? It also won't let me set the restore points to keep to anything less than 2, so if the copy job runs every 1 days, it looks like i forced to have at least 2 daily backups there? This copy every X setting is really messing with my head. If i set it to copy every 30 days, and start the job today on the 18th, i will end up with a bunch of monthly backups that are done on the 18th of every month (or around there since it is every 30 days) and also a bunch of monthly ones from the keep additional option. This is crazy.
And for the keep additional restore points option, should months be set to 11 or 12? 12 would seem the obvious answer but then wouldn't the yearly backup actually be the 12th monthly?
Are there advantages to picking the VMs as the source over picking the backup job of the VM as the source? I would assume picking the VM might be better because if later i delete or recreated the backup job of that VM, the backup copy job wouldn't need to be adjusted?
We are approaching the end of the year so i would really like to have my jobs made and ready to go for the yearly backup job. I would really appreciate some guidance here.