Backup Strategy - NAS and Rotating USB Possible?

[QueueAK]

One of my customers wants to have a manually rotated USB drive rather than a cloud backup since those are not in his control. Paranoia over who controls his data and his clients data maybe, but there is some logic to it.

Anyway. Originally I was planning to have Veeam backup to a NAS and then replicate to Wasabi for offsite. Without creating two separate backup jobs, is it possible to backup to a NAS and then to one of several USB drive which rotate offsite via sneakernet?

My idea is that way we have large long term backup storage on the NAS with lots of storage for months and a weekly rotation offsite via USB. Is this viable?

[veremin]

One job cannot write to two targets, so, you will have to create two separate jobs with different retention policies. Thanks!

[PetrM]

Looks like one more option would be to leverage backup copy and point it to the offsite repository.

Thanks!

[QueueAK]

Backup Copy, I've seen a bit of info on this while looking this afternoon. Does that essentially copy an existing backup to another repository without having to create an entire job?

[Natalia Lupacheva]

HI Culley,

Backup Copy job will copy your backups to a secondary location.
You can get more information about Backup copy jobs here.

Thanks!

[foggy]

Basically, it is another type of job that doesn't touch production VMs but uses your primary repository (NAS in your case) as a data source. It can be pointed to a secondary repository backed up by rotated drives to fulfill your offsite backup requirement.

[adriano.giorgini]

Hi Foggy,

We use the NAS copy function to direct copy Veeam backup files to USB disk for external rotation, but only outside backup windows.
If forever incremental is enable, is possible copy only the last modified file, so the copy on the USB external disk is always the last full backup.

Regards.

[agrob]

Hi

I also use the NAS copy to USB Disc functionality. This works fine and with good performance. Most NAS also offer notification if the copy to usb job was running or not. Performance with veeam Backup Copy to USB is way to slow because veeam handels it differs and does not "just copy" the files.

Best Regards

[zoltank]

Look into tape instead of USB. It's more durable, has massive capacity, and is very easy to air gap.

Veeam also has built in tape support.

[Nick-SAC]

Tape undoubtedly has the Capacity and Air-Gap advantages but I don’t understand how it could be considered to be ‘more durable’.

I wish I had a dollar for every bad/broken/unreadable Tape Cartridge I’ve thrown out over the years... Oh Wait, I do!

[Gostev]

Reliability in terms of URE (Unrecoverable Read Error) is up to 1000 times better for LTO tape media comparing to spinning drives (depends on the type). It's hard to see though, because hard drives would happily and quietly return you bad data in the same situation where tape would fail to read due to a checksum error.

And if you mean reliability as a rotated media, then spinning drives are definitely much more fragile. Even when they sit in a rack, on average 2% fail within a year, usually due to vibrations. But, once you start transporting them... it gets much worse. This is specifically where tape shines!