Best backup schedule for tape?

[gshaw]

We've just bought Veeam and will be shifting over from Backup Exec, which also means a shift from purely tape-based backups to disk-tape.

We're buying a dedicated server to do backups, will be an HP DL180 G6 with 5 x 2TB SATA drives for storage. Will probably be in a RAID5+hot spare config.

Having read the manual the reverse synthetic backups look good but we also need to get that data off to tape (I'm thinking weekly should suffice?) We currently have a standard Grandfather-Father-Son backup strategy, keeping monthly tapes for archive so what would the best method be to try and replicate this with Veeam?

Would I need to do a full backup as a separate job at the end of the week and then back that off to tape (overwriting it each week) then leave the disk-based job as reverse synthetic?

Our current backups around around 550GB (quite a small network in education) so there should be plenty of space, although not sure how the jobs grow in terms of percentage of space used vs the size of the full backup job? Ideally I'd like to split the storage on the server and use DPM 2010 for our file shares to give continuous data protection as a 2nd layer of defence along with the Veeam jobs

[ShadFX]

Hi gshaw, we are going through exactly the same scenario as you at the moment. From what I understand and from what I have read, if you enable synthetic fulls on your incremental backup, you can copy the latest "Full" backup file off to another location (tape, for instance) and then import it back into Veeam and mount it succesfully. I havent gotten around to testing this yet, but everything ive read has pointed to it working in this manor. Alternatively, I am going to setup the periodic full backups to happen once every saturday and then run my tape archive once every Sunday AM. If you then want one monthly backup on seperate tape I would suggest you have a seperate monthly job for it in Veeam.

Could any of the Veeam mods confirm im correct in what im saying above!?

[Vitaliy S.]

Would I need to do a full backup as a separate job at the end of the week and then back that off to tape (overwriting it each week) then leave the disk-based job as reverse synthetic?

If I were you I would use Forward Incremental backup mode with either synthetic fulls enabled once a week (every 2 weeks) or periodic active fulls. That should give you great flexibility in working with tapes.

Hi gshaw, we are going through exactly the same scenario as you at the moment. From what I understand and from what I have read, if you enable synthetic fulls on your incremental backup, you can copy the latest "Full" backup file off to another location (tape, for instance) and then import it back into Veeam and mount it succesfully. I havent gotten around to testing this yet, but everything ive read has pointed to it working in this manor. Alternatively, I am going to setup the periodic full backups to happen once every saturday and then run my tape archive once every Sunday AM. If you then want one monthly backup on seperate tape I would suggest you have a seperate monthly job for it in Veeam.

Could any of the Veeam mods confirm im correct in what im saying above!?

Yes, provided that you have a VBK file, you can import a backup chain to the Veeam console at any time. Forward Incremental mode was designed as a "tape friendly" backup mode, thus everything that has been said above is one of the most commonly used scenarios in D2D2T backup approach.

[ShadFX]

Thanks for confirming my thoughts Vitality.

[gshaw]

Just as a quick question after reading another thread about forward incremental backups... will the synthetic full backup mode reduce the number of full backups kept stored at any one time? I noticed in the thread about 14 checkpoints that there could in theory be 4 full backups at some points?

Would another possible solution be to have the standard reverse incremental solution as the primary backup job then once a week run a separate full backup as our tape archive and just overwrite this job each week? That way I get the efficiency of reverse incremental and a weekly backup equivalent to what I have on tape at the moment?

Thanks for the replies so far, really useful stuff

[Vitaliy S.]

will the synthetic full backup mode reduce the number of full backups kept stored at any one time?

Not sure what you're trying to say...in Forward Incremental backup mode retention policy doesn't behave in the same way as in Reversed Incremental mode no matter whether you use Synthetic full or not.

Would another possible solution be to have the standard reverse incremental solution as the primary backup job then once a week run a separate full backup as our tape archive and just overwrite this job each week?

Yes, you can do that, however please note that with Reversed Incremental mode the VBK file is the most recent state of your VMs, which is an equivalent to your Full job run.

That way I get the efficiency of reverse incremental and a weekly backup equivalent to what I have on tape at the moment?

Correct.