Long Term Retention

[AndyH]

I have a question regarding long term retention and the best way to go about it.

Currently we backup our file servers using incremental backup, with a synthetic full every friday and have 90 restore point retention. We use ExaGrid for storage. Currently the 90 restore points equate to 90TB of storage (obviously the ExaGrid heavily deduplicates this).

I have just been asked by our legal team to retain backups for long term, perhaps in excess of a year (I haven't been given an exact time frame). At some point this will come to an end though and we will go back to 90 restore points.

Obviously I have some concerns about capacity on our production ExaGrids. I do however have a spare exagrid available, that I would like to utilise to storage the extra restore points. Then when I am told we no longer need the long term retention, I can easily decommission the storage.

What I would like to do is retain the most recent 90 restore points on our production exagrids and then ship older restore points to the spare exagrid. Or if that is not possible, retain the 90 recent restore points in production and have a full copy of all the restore points (recent + long term) on the spare.

I was hoping to use a Backup Copy job for this, but Backup Copy only copies the most recent restore points and I need to copy all the restore points. Is there a way to make Backup Copy copy all of the restore points and then update with the most recent going forward? The only other way I can think of doing it is to clone the backup job, manually copy all the restore points to the spare exagrid, repoint the backup job to the spare exagrid and then change the retention policy. However that would involve backing up the servers twice every night.

Thanks in advance.

[foggy]

You could also create a backup copy job and let it start its chain on the second storage with the required retention, while manually copying existing backups to some other folder on that storage for manual retention. Once the backup copy job reaches the required retention setting (for ex., 90 recent + how far back you need to have), you could remove the manually copied points.

You cannot use existing backups as a seed for the backup copy job (so it continue to backup incrementally), since mapping is possible with the backup job chain consisting of a single full and subsequent increments only, while you have several fulls.