Backup Copy Strategy Advice

[burak]

Hello,

I need an advice with backup copy jobs because I get confused by the retention policies.

We currently have a primary backup storage with 4TB space. We have two backup jobs:
Backup job 1 has retention policy set on 28 days and uses 170GB on active full and 12GB per incremental backup.
Backup job 2 has retention policy set on 35 days and uses 300GB on active full and 12GB per incremental backup.
Schedule is every day at 7pm. Active full is set on Saturday.

Now, I created two backup copy jobs to copy the backups to a secondary target with 4TB space too. First copy job is at 10pm for job 1 and second copy job is at 11:30pm for job 2.
I configured to keep 49 restore points and activated the GFS retention policy to keep 4 weekly backups every Sunday at 10pm.

Now I get the following problems and questions:

1) Those weekly active full backups are created on Saturday and Sunday and have both the name "Copy Backup JobD2017-02-11T220000_W.vbk". Is this because my main job creates active full on Saturday and the Backup copy job creates them on Sunday? Should I just switch the GFS settings to Saturday?
2) I think the retention policy on 2nd target is much to high. I want to keep as much as weekly / monthly backups as disk space is available without getting in any problems of insufficient space. Should I set the restore points on the copy jobs to 7 and add the number of weekly backups?
3) Should I combine both copy jobs to one single backup copy job?

I am thankful for any advice.

Best regards

Burak

[DGrinev]

Hi Burak,

1) Backup copy job creates full backup file only on initial run and then moves it by injecting incremental files according to retention policy. When the first Sunday comes, BCJ puts a GFS weekly mark on it and the job continues.
Finally, BCJ makes a copy of the full backup file when it reaches Sunday. Hope this clarifies the behavior you see.

2) Can you please describe how many restore points you would like to have and the use case for storing 49 restore points? If you need weekly backups, then you should enable GFS retention and keep, for example, 7 days of restore points.
On a side note, I would recommend you to use Restore Point Simulator for backup repository capacity planning.

3) You won’t get any benefits from combining two copy jobs to a single one, assuming that the list of VMs in both jobs is different. All VMs will be processed in the same way.

Thanks!

[burak]

Hello,

thank you for your answer.

1) I think I understand it now. I changed the BCJ to keep 7 restore points and GFS weekly backup on Saturday at 11:30pm The BCJ starts every day at 11:30pm. My Backup Job finish at 11pm. I activated the BCJ yesterday and it automatically creates the first full backup file. Unfortunately, the copy interval exceeded, because 11:30pm the scheduled job starts. I have now two backup files in my repository: One without GFS weekly marker and one with it! I thought, the GFS marker will be set on Saturday but yesterday was the BCJ of Friday? Do I understand something wrong here?

2) The restore point simulator is awesome. This is what I needed. I calculated the necessary storage size and can keep 6 weekly backups and 7 restore points by using Active Full GFS. My primary backup target keeps 35-42 restore points, with active full each week. I think by this I have nearly the same time period of backups on each target. Maybe I look for a deduplication storage solution or more HDD to keep more GFS versions on the secondary target.

3) I combined both BCJ to one, its easier to manage.

Thank you very much!

[burak]

I still have problems with multiple weekly backups in my BCJ repository.

My backup job starts every day at 9:30pm and does a active full backup on Saturday.
My backup copy job starts every day at 6:00am, keeps 7 restore points, and keeps a weekly backup on Sunday at 6:00am. The option to read the entire backup from source repository is enabled.

But the weekly backup is created on Saturday and Sunday. Both are from the 6:00am job.



If you look at the last two backups, the first was created at 6:00am on Saturday. The second one was created on Sunday, like I configured it.

Do I understand something wrong here with backup copy jobs or is this some bug?

[foggy]

This looks like a known issue. Please contact support for verification.