B&R 9.5 - retain month end backups and manage catalogues?

[skafen]

Hi there!

I'm struggling to understand two issues with my Veeam B&R 9.5 system.

what I need to do is achieve what I have had with a backup exec tape based system being able to keep monthly and yearly tapes.

My veeam box has 17TB of space on it plus I have a pair of 2TB USB drives plugged in to the server that I want to copy the files too as long term storage for end of year backups etc. Currently I've been manually copying the end of month files to them alternately.

I have three backup jobs set up on my veeam system, a daily job that does a few things like exchange and fileservers, a weekly job that does some other servers with less frequently changing data and a monthly job that does a couple of other bits that hardly change.

I understand there is something called GFS (Grandfather-father-son) type backups which seem to be in the right direction but I can't understand how to use them and the incrementals with occasional full backup creation and I'm just going round and round in the documentation search and I keep coming back to using it with tapes not the local storage.

My daily backup was producing 600gb as it's backing up my exchange, ad state and fileserver, so I've changed that to doing an incremental with a full at the weekends which helps but then my next problem crops up. I can't figure out how to manage the catalogues for the backup files in that I've been running this for a couple of months and now have 6 days worth of incrementals plus a full every week for a couple of months now. So I want to keep the end of month full backup and copy it to the usb drive etc but then want to get rid of the incrementals inbetween to stop them taking up space. How so I do it? I can't find any way to delete the catalogues on the server from the removed incremental files. I have the rentention just set to keep 500 points at the moment.

The documentation I've read says that I can go in the the Backup and Replication menu/backups/Disk repository, select the job, choose properties and be able to right click on the list of files and delete them but I get no menu at all when doing this So I'm totally stuck about removing the old incrementals.

I like the product so far, it's been fantastic restoring files and exchange mail items but I've got to figure out how to manage all these backup sets as my 17TB is rapidly getting eaten.

Any help greatly appreciated at this point.

Thanks

James

[foggy]

Hi James, Veeam B&R allows to perform GFS backups with the help of the backup copy jobs. Backup copy doesn't copy files in their entirety but creates restore points containing the corresponding VM state copying the required blocks from the files stored in source repository, so it doesn't matter if the source backup job produces fulls or incrementals, if that is your main concern.

[skafen]

Thanks Foggy,

So using that to manage to either another repoistory on my 17TB volume and/or USB drives, how would you set the source jobs up - e.g. my daily backups would you like them in forever incremental or full backup every day etc and then set the retention down to say 7 days?

Thanks

James

[foggy]

It doesn't matter for the backup copy jobs. You configure your source jobs based on the required RPO/RTO and other considerations, backup copy jobs do not depend on these settings.

[skafen]

Thanks again Foggy, I think I've worked it out now. I set the daily job to retain 8 restore points and can see the Backup Copy job start to do things so will watch to see if it does the monthly thing first off.

Last question then, is there a way of maniuplating the catalogue though to remove old backup files should I have to delete them from the disk by hand for space etc.

Thanks

James