How do you stage?

[Chihiro]

I was just wondering how everyone is staging their backups. In other words, how are you off-loading your vbk/vbr files to secondary/removable storage?

Here is my situtaion: I am currently backing-up to local storage (RAID) on the Veeam Backup console, but will need to perform staging in the future. I will probably backup to tape by adding the Veeam Backup console as a client in my ARCserve environment. The question is, should I delete old files on the Veeam Backup console and perform full backups of the target via ARCserve, or, should I keep all files on the Veeam Backup console (naturally overwriting sessions as they expire) and perform incremental/differential backups via ARCserve?

If anyone has an opinion or ideas for a better method, I'm very interested!

[McClane]

I backup the *.vbk files daily to tape and leave the *.vbr files out. Then I have a full backup on tape every day and also have the incrementals on disk.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Chihiro,

You shouldn't delete manually VBK/VRB files, cause in this way the chain of your available rollbacks (VRB files) will be broken. The retention policy is applied automatically in the end of the job session each time you run the job.

If you want to backup VBK and VRB files, for example to a tape (or another storage), you can execute a post-backup job script that will write down all the files. As for the question what should you backup, it's up to you, you can either backup just VBK file (the most recent state of your backups) or VBK plus VRB files (the previous states of your backups).

[Chihiro]

McClane/vsafarov,

Thanks for your replies. It's all becoming clear now (after understanding synthetic backups).
So basically, if I want to stage backups, at the very minimum I would need to copy the .vbk file.
Which in essence means, the post-backup to tape or external storage has to be a full backup (of the full synthetic backup).