Looking for best way to handle our month-end backup job

[akrietsch]

We have a couple backup jobs that we need to run during the first few days of each month. Basically, we have a couple servers that are involved in some month-end processing we do, and at some point in the first few days of each month, when that process is finished, we get notified that it is complete and we need to kick off a backup of that server that we need to hold on to for 18 months. Since we have to wait for this process to complete, the job will have to be kicked off manually, as it could potentially finish on the 2nd of the new month, or the 5th, for example.

I was having a little trouble of wrapping my head around how to handle this in a backup job. I know for one-off backups there is the Veeam Zip option, but that currently doesn't let us choose more than 1 month retention, plus we need these backups to integrate with a backup copy job so they get moved to off-site storage. I would be fine if each backup of these servers was a full each time, since it will go 1 month in between needing backups, there is probably no reason to have it stay in an incremental chain for that long.

Any tips for how I could set up a job that would need to manually be run at a certain point at the beginning of each month? Is simply setting up the job, not including any specific schedule, and just right-clicking the job and choosing to run an active-full when I need sufficient enough?

[Shestakov]

Hi Alex and welcome to the community!

...when that process is finished, we get notified that it is complete and we need to kick off a backup of that server...

What about a script which would trigger the job to run once the notification is received?
Otherwise indeed, you can keep the job unscheduled and start it manually each month.
Do you want these monthly backups to be incremental or full by the way?
Thanks!

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, I would also suggest to use PowerShell + Windows Task Scheduler (set it to capture the success event of your monthly task) to initiate your backup job.

[akrietsch]

Thanks! That helps. I will look into setting up the job and just keeping it unscheduled, and maybe using powershell and task scheduler to automate the running of the job.

[Shestakov]

Sounds good!
You may find Powershell script samples on the corresponding subforum.
Thanks!