Demystifying GFS on Backup Job

[jimnoco]

Greetings,

I've been doing some searching on the forums and I haven't been able to find this one answered. The documentation for configuration of GFS is confusing and I want to get to the bottom of it now that GFS is available in the regular backup job on v10 which is awesome.

I have a customer with the following retention need: 14 restore points (7 daily, 4 weekly, 3 monthly). My question is twofold. First, do I need to set "14" or "7" as the retention policy to cover all of these or does that field specifically pertain to the dailies that run? In other words, if I set "7" as the retention policy does that also cover the fulls for archival? Or should it be set to "14" as the retention policy needs to cover everything including the archival fulls? Second, for the job to "keep certain backups longer for archival purposes" do I need to enable running periodic active fulls to cover this? Or is the job smart enough to capture a full on those time periods and retain them? If I need to set periodic active fulls, do I need to run them weekly or monthly, as this specific retention requirement needs to retain both?

Thanks in advance,
Jimmy

[veremin]

or "7" as the retention policy.

This.

If I need to set periodic active fulls, do I need to run them weekly

You will need to schedule weekly full backup.

Thanks!

[Gostev]

No, active fulls are not required for GFS. Vast majority of customers do synthetic fulls instead, particularly because they take no physical disk space with ReFS/XFS backup repositories.

[jimnoco]

Thank you Gostev and veremin. So to confirm for 14 restore points (7 daily, 4 weekly, 3 monthly) this is my configuration on all of the jobs:

Retention policy: 7
Keep certain full backups longer for archival purposes: Keep weekly full backups for 4 weeks (Tuesday which is when synthetic fulls run), Keep monthly backups for 3 months (First)
Weekly synthetic fulls on Tuesdays.

[Gostev]

Looks good.