GFS Retention Policy

[wolflord]

Hi All,

I am attempting to implement GFS on some of my VM backups. Although I've read some of the documentation/KB articles, I am a little confused on how weekly backups work..and if they work the way I think they do.

Do weekly backups keep multiple restore points within them? For example, I configured the backup copy job to have 4 weekly backups. If I wanted to restore a file on Tuesday of Weekly backup #2, would I be able to drill down to this level? Do the weekly backups allow us to narrow down to everyday of that week? If it doesn't work that way, what exactly do the Weekly backups offer?

The idea of us implementing GFS is so we could go back a year from a file level or VM level.

These are my current Backup Copy Job Settings:

Restore Points to keep: 7
Weekly Backup : 4
Monthly : 12
Quarterly : 1
Yearly : 1

[Shestakov]

Weekly backup contains only 1 restore point with the most recent VM state to that day. It doesn`t contain the whole chain of restore points.
Thanks!

[wolflord]

So what exactly are weekly backups used for? They are just full backups of the VM that day?

[foggy]

Correct, each GFS restore point contains a single VM state for the corresponding date.

[Shestakov]

And if there was no backup that day, the full backup will contain data of the previous backup.

[amitshmil]

Hi,I'm trying to accomplice a simple task in Veeam 9.0:
I need to create a weekly/monthly backup to disk and take it to tape .
I kind of lost with all the backups methods.what is the simple solution for creating this task?

Thanks    

[Shestakov]

Hi amitshmil and welcome to the community!
You need to leverage backup copy GFS and tape GFS jobs. Please review the topic for more information.

[anbj01]

Hi !

We have two different datacenters and want to keep our backup on both sites with this settings :

Restore Points to keep: 30
Weekly Backup : 4
Monthly : 12

What is the best way to set this up ?

[DGrinev]

Hi Andreas,

Please can you provide more information about your scenario?
If i got it right, you want to copy backups from one Datacenter to another?
If that's the case, then you can set up Backup Copy Job with GFS Retention policy and choose the backup job as a source.

Thanks!

[wolflord]

What happens if a regular Backup Job is still running when a GFS copy job is set to start?

Will the GFS copy job wait until the backup job is completely finished and then start the copy process..or will it begin copying an unfinished backup file?

If it begins copying an unfinished back up file..will this cause the GFS copy job retention point to essentially be unusable?

[johan.h]

It should wait for the job to finish. https://bp.veeam.expert/job_configurati ... y_job.html

[blithespirit]

Set the GFS Backup Copy Job as a secondary job to your main backup (in the BCJ wizard use the job as source, or edit the main backup job and on the storage page select the secondary check box), that way it will run after the backup finishes each time without having to work out new schedules or miss backups.

[wolflord]

Set the GFS Backup Copy Job as a secondary job to your main backup (in the BCJ wizard use the job as source, or edit the main backup job and on the storage page select the secondary check box), that way it will run after the backup finishes each time without having to work out new schedules or miss backups.

Thanks for the suggestion, this is great!

Question...when setting up the secondary storage (on the main backup) to point to the GFS backup copy job, will it ignore the 'Copy Every X day starting At' setting on the BCJ?

I'm just wondering how the secondary job setting will interact with the 'Copy Every' setting in the GFS job

[blithespirit]

yes, you are right.

What it will do is run after the primary job and check its own criteria to do anything, which is what the run everyday does anyway.

it will still follow your schedule in GFS such as: check for rules to run with, Monday- Friday = regular restore point, Saturday = do nothing, Sunday do regular weekly as part of GFS, monthly do GFS plan etc.........

[wolflord]

Awesome! Exactly what I need. Thanks so much!!

[wolflord]

Hi All,

I've been trying to set up GFS backup copy jobs for some of my VMs. The idea is to have a weekly GFS retention point that occurs every Sunday.

After letting some time go by, I notice that all my 'Weekly' retention points are showing the date for every Monday as opposed to every Sunday.

Anyone know what I'm doing wrong? How can I get the weekly GFS jobs to run on a Sunday? Why are they running on Mondays?

Example1:




This is pretty much the same situation for all the GFS jobs..

[veremin]

Couldn't it happen that someone changed a weekly schedule to Monday at some point of time and reverted it back recently? Honestly, I cannot think of any other reason of the experienced behaviour.

Anyway, might be a good idea to investigate it further with support team assistance.

Thanks.

[ds2]

Just a idea. Colud it be caused by the sheduling times. Daily 3am and weekly at 11 am? And how long is the window for the job?

As far as i know weekly, monthly, quaterly and yearliy Restorepoints always starts at 0 am. You create restorepoints at 3am on so it is preformed in the next run on monday.

[foggy]

Backup copy creates backup file right when the interval starts, so each restore point has the date corresponding to the interval start time and date when it was created. Since, in backup copy GFS mechanism, the regular full backup becomes GFS restore point once it reaches the day specified in GFS settings (Sunday 11am in your case), it is always the restore point created on previous Monday.

[ChrisGundry]

Hi There,

I have a daily job that runs every day and backs up to Repo1 and retains 7 restore points.
I then have a GFS job that is setup as a secondary target for the above job and stores its backups in Repo2. This job is configured to 'copy every 7 day' and retain 2 restore points, 5 weekly points, 5 monthly points. The scheudle is configured so the weekly backup is Friday at 23:00, monthly is the last day of the month.

I have just gone to restore a month end backup for something and instead of it being on the 31/03/2017 it is on the 25/03/2017. This has WM next to it so is being used as a weekly and monthly. As far as I am concerned I should have the 25th as a W and then the 31st as a M on top of the 25th...? I have checked a few others and I can see the same issue, the monthly backup that is being retained isn't the last day of the month. The 30/04/2017 should be the end of April but the backups that have been retained are 28-29/04/2017 not 30th. 24-25/02/2017 has been retained as the February month end instead of the 28/02/2017.

Can anyone advise why this might be happening? Is it because of the 'copy every 7 day' cycle it is currently on? Means that it can only use the Friday point (when the 7 day cycle is set to cycle through) to create GFS points from? If so does that mean we should change it so it runs daily and on most days it will copy the backups but won't create a GFS point, unless it is a Friday or a month end day?

Many thanks!

[foggy]

Hi Chris, GFS restore point is created once the full backup in the regular backup copy chain reaches the day specified in GFS settings (in your case, last day of the month for the monthly restore point).

[ChrisGundry]

Hi Foggy,

Sorry, I am not sure I am quite following that last bit? Are you able to explain it differently?
Are you saying that the CopyJob is getting to the 31st and because it only has 2 points, plus the weekly points it is using the weekly point as it is closer to the 31st than the latest '2' points that it has?

When we set this up we discussed with Veeam support and we were advised that this way of doing it would work, so that is why we continued with it. But obviously it isn't giving us monthly backups that were from the day we told it to use, which isn't what we need.

I need the month end backup to actually be at the month end, not on a random day up to a week away from it. So what should I do to achieve this? Should I leave it set at 2 restore points, but set it to do a daily copy? Then when the 31st comes around it will have copied the source backup from last night copied over and it will use that? Or should I do something else?

I am just thinking that by doing that it will be copying data every day, but only using it on a Friday for the weekly and on the last day of the month for the monthly. But on any other day it has copied the data and won't be using it for creation of a GFS point. And by doing it every day it will be doing a merge process every day on the 'normal' restore points...? This repo is stored on ReFS so that is less of an issue but still...

Thanks

Chris

[foggy]

Please disregard the last sentence in my post above, it was a momentary lapse of reason. I've removed it to avoid confusion of future readers. Indeed, the monthly full should be put aside once the full backup in the regular chain reaches the last day of the month and should have the date either of that day (in case it falls on the day when the job cycle starts) or the day the next job cycle starts. I'd recommend to ask support to review the setup once again.

[ChrisGundry]

I posted this topic because I wanted to get some feedback and suggestions from people that do this. I have had this post merged into another topic now, where no one will find it. I don't really want to read through 200 posts to find any possible relevant information in the topic. I have read several pages and not found anything that helps me at the moment... Very annoying.

Are saying to set it to run daily and also set it to retain 31 restore points? Can you please write out what you are suggesting? Maybe with an example?

If you are suggesting the above then I don't really want to do that as it will retain 31 restore points, copying one each day, taking up network traffic, storage space and also do a daily merge and shuffle process taking up IO. I just want it to run on the Friday and take a copy of the source backup from that day. Run on the month end and take a backup on that day. Would it change things if I set it to create the backups using "read entire backup from source backup"? Would that make it run on the required day and only copy data on that day? I really don't want to have it run and copy data every day, store that for a month just to get 6 restore points (5 weekly and a monthly), then repeat that forever...

I tend to avoid raising support requests for things like this because I find the support team don't tend to be as good at understanding what we are trying to achieve when it comes to things like copy jobs. I guess that is why the original setup was suggested to us and as it now turns out, it doesn't work. I was hoping for some clarification on the forum instead. Unfortunately at the moment I am still just as confused as before.

[foggy]

The only thing I've suggested is to verify the job configuration with the help of support, since what you're seeing doesn't look expected.

[phyu7789]

Hi All,

I would like to set a backup copy job to keep the monthly backup for 7 years, how should i set for the GFS?
The backup job is running by daily now.



Is this correct?

[PTide]

Hi,

Well, first of all, 7 years is 84 months , but you got the idea right. Also please keep in mind that HDDs are not very reliable for such long-term archival, you should consider using GFS to Tape feature to offload your backups to tapes instead.

Thanks

[phyu7789]

Thanks for your suggestion.

[Zach123]

Hi All

Not sure if I should have started a new thread, but since the thread is active from the last few years and issue is related to the GFS Retention policy, just listing my concern here.

The query is regarding the impact of reducing the regular restore points count on monthly GFS restore points ( Not yet created )

This is how our backup copy job currently looks like ( 100 regular restore points and 12 monthly GFS restore points )
https://imgur.com/AC0UEWN

Lately, we have observed that we are running out of space on the backup repository. When checked we noticed that we have backups sitting from the month of May ( last 5 months).
https://i.imgur.com/DoIUFa3.png

When we set up a copy job, we set up with a copy interval of 1 day to keep the copy for 100 days. But later on, we had to change that to 3 days due to the increase in data. Now we are running out of disk space and need to ensure that only 100 days worth of data is saved in the repository ( not 100 restore points ).

Now, let's say if I reduced the regular restore point from 100 to 50, would it still create the missing monthly GFS restore points for each of those months for which it has not created the monthly GFS restore point yet, before deleting the regular restore points.

[soncscy]

Hi Zaki,

I can see your problem -- remember that retention is point based, not time based, so the value for "restore points to keep" refers to how many points on disk you want. It is not related to any time period. It may coincide with days if you do daily copies, but that is not a guarantee.

The reason you only have a few GFS points, from my understanding, is because GFS is only made when the main chain merges. Since it won't merge until the job reaches retention (in your case, 100 days), that's why it just kept making more increments and no GFS points.

I honestly don't know what will happen if you just drop off the points, but I assume as it merges each point in, the GFS point for the day being merged in should be created, but I honestly don't know.