Can Veeam remove unwanted VBK and VIB files

[gingerjumper]

Hey everyone, I hope someone can please help me with an issue we have.

We recently bought and started using Veeam. Its a great product but I am having trouble configuring the way we would like.

Our backup strategy is the following;

Veeam does the following;

Friday - take a full synthetic image of 50 VM's taking just over 500gb space
(no back ups are made Saturday or sunday)
Monday- incremental backup made using about 120gb of space
Tuesday - incremental backup made using about 120gb of space
Wednesday - incremental backup made using about 120gb of space
Thursday - incremental backup made using about 120gb of space
Friday - restart the process

Backup Exec runs in paralell to Veeam as we need to keep the Veeam images on a tape for offsite backup. We use tapes with about 800gb of space and the backup job runs at 10am each weekday.So the process looks like for Backup exec;

monday = Fridays sythentic backup only
Tuesdays = Fridays VBK plus Monday's VIB
Wednesday = Fridays VBK + VIB for Monday and Tuesday
Thursday = Fridays VBK + VIB's for Monday - Wednesday --> this is a problem it exceeds the tape size
Friday = Fridays VBK + VIB's for Monday - Thursday ---> this is a problem it exceeds the tape size

As indicated our problem is in the backup exec jobs for Thursday and Friday. When we bought Veeam we were told that it could remove unwanted VIB or VBK files. This doesn't seem to be happening at present and I am wondering if I have not configured something correctly. We need to have the VBK file for that week on the tape along with 1 or 2 VIB files depending on space.

I noticed that Veeam can run a script after a completed job. Would it be possible for someone to suggest a script that could say remoove VBK files over 5 days old and VIB files that are over 2 days old?

I know that backup exec can have exceptions depending on file access but this is not working for us because the repository for the Veeam data is 1tb in size. So even if we tell Backup Exec to ignore VBK files over 5 days old and VIB over 2 days old the problem is not resolved because the repository becomes full. We need to automate the removal of files.

Any help you can offer to a novice like me would be most welcome thank you

[Vitaliy S.]

James,

Veeam does remove unwanted VBK/VIB(VRB) files, you can do that via adjusting retention policy settings for each backup/replication job.The behaviour of the retention policy depends on the backup mode you've chosen: Forward Incremental or Reversed Incremental.

Please see our stickied F.A.Q. section for more information: >>> READ THIS FIRST : [FAQ] FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS <<<

Provided that you need to have 1 Full Backup + 1 or 2 rollbacks for restore (points in time) and you're limited with storage free space, then I would recommend setting retention policy to 2 and choosing Reversed Incremental backup mode.

Thanks!

[Gostev]

Since you have a requirement to backup complete latest backup state to tape every day, it sounds like you really want to use reversed incremental backup mode instead of regular incremental, as with reversed incremental latest backup file is always full recovery file of the latest state. So everyday, VBK will be the only backup file that you need to backup to tape. And this file will be the only thing you need to recover your VMs to the latest state. Please check out reversed backup mode "how it works" question, as well as comparison table in FAQ for more information. Thanks!

[alexfeig1]

Which would be much more useful if it could be placed in another directory. Unfortunately as-is, most backup products won't allow for you to selectively back up a dynamically named file. This is an important feature.

[Gostev]

But virtually all file backup products do allow backing up only files without archive bit set, and are setting one on file automatically as soon as they process it, which means you do not even have to know exact file name - at any moment, there will be only one VBK file in directory without archive bit set, so you should set the backup product to process *.VBK.

Also, many file level backup products allow backing up only latest files, so this again does not require knowing exact file names.

I have also posted a PowerShell script earlier that starts arbitrary executable file feeding path to latest backup file as an argument, and with this you can achieve pretty much anything.

But, if static file name on disk is absolutely required, I suppose you could simply use post-job PowerShell script to create a soft link to latest backup file, always using the same name for this soft link. Then, point whatever tool you use to that file.

[alexfeig1]

Ah, true, post processing could do that. Good idea.

(Though I still think it would be a good idea to spit out the full to another path!)

[Gostev]

That would be good idea only for very small backups (and so tiny environments)... imagine how much time would it take to spit out even 5TB backup file (which is still quite a small environment). Plus all the disk space required to host a copy...