Guidance with setting up Veeam Backup Job & Copy

[CraigZA]

Hi all

First time user of Veeam so please bear with me.

VBR 8 is installed on a Windows 2008 R2 server with four USB 2TB disks available, one disk used per week, disk is rotated every Thursday AM, full backup of 1 VM required every weeknight.

So for week 1 of the month I have DISK1, week 2 I have DISK2, week 3 I have DISK3 and week 4 I have DISK4.

Goal is to keep 1 full backup on one USB disk per week (from Wednesday night, previous Tuesday/Monday/Friday/Thursday night backups to be removed) and keep 14 full backups on one disk per year.

14 full backups x 4 disks equals 52 full backups, that should give me a year of backups (52 weeks) of the single VM.

Is this possible with a simple Backup Job or would I have to get clever and look at Backup Copy? Any guidance is appreciated?

Thanks!

[Shestakov]

Hi Craig,

Could you clarify your goals a bit? As I understood, you need to keep weekly backups for a year each, on 4 disks(14 on each). And what about
"1 full backup on one USB disk per week (from Wednesday night, previous Tuesday/Monday/Friday/Thursday night backups to be removed)" ?

Do you need 2 copies of each backup, one with a week-long retention, another with year-long?

Thanks!

[CraigZA]

Essentially I need to keep a single full backup each week per disk.

So, Thursday AM the disk is rotated, Thursday night full backup occurs, Friday night full backup occurs, Monday night full backup occurs, Tuesday night full backup occurs, Wednesday night full backup occurs and is kept, previous Tuesday/Monday/Friday/Thursday backups are removed.

Thursday AM the disk is rotated again and the cycle repeats. Each disk always retains a full backup from the Wednesday evening during the week it was used. Each disk will effectively get used 14 weeks per year and keep one backup per week that it's used.

At the end of a year each disk should hold 14 full backups, each full backup to be from a Wednesday evening.

[Shestakov]

Thanks for the reply, Craig!
So you need Full backups only (no incrementals) and you want to backup every workday (night)?

14 full backups x 4 disks equals 52 full backups

That is 56, not 52. How many do you need?

that should give me a year of backups (52 weeks) of the single VM.

If you backup every workday, you need 260 backups. I suppose the plan is to retain one of backups from each week for a year. Is that correct?
Thanks!

[CraigZA]

1.) Correct, full backup to USB disk every Mon/Tues/Wed/Thurs/Fri evening.

2.) Apologies, my maths is off, 56 is correct and fine, as long as I keep a year worth of backups.

3.) Again correct, indeed the plan is to retain one backup a week (the one that occurs on Wednesday evening as the USB disk is rotated on Thursday morning) for a year.

[Shestakov]

Got it.

Since you want restore points with different retention rules, the plan can not be accomplished simply with one job.

The plan is to set 2 backup jobs.
First to run Mon,Tue,Thu,Fri with the retention equal to how many "not historical" backups you need.
Second to run on Wednesdays only with 56 restore points.

Do you want to store backups only on USB drives or you need/want some backups on the host itself?
By the way, why not to run incrementals as well as full backups? Thanks!

[CraigZA]

Many thanks, that's such a simple solution

The VM backup is small enough to warrant a full backup every day to USB disk. Moving forward I plan to co-locate another ESXI server in a datacentre and setup full backups to the co-lo server every Saturday and incremental during weeknights after the full backup to USB disk.

Will implement the solution tomorrow!

[Shestakov]

Glad we`ve found a solution.
By the way, to make copies of backups to the DR site, it`s recommended to use backup copy job rather than make another backups.