Looking for Opinions on Full Backups

[kpin]

Ok I've realized I need to change by backup jobs due to the way take our backups offsite.

I have a Veeam server setup with ~6 TB of storage space. I was running 7 day forward incremental with 1 active full weekly. I'd like to keep at least a minimum of a months backups on the Veeam server. Id really like to go 60 or even 90 days if possible. The issue with the way I'm setup now is that we do a daily backup of our Veeam server to an external drive to take offsite. I'd like to rotate these daily, but with the Active full backup running, My backup to the external drive runs a full off the entire Veeam server. This takes a lonnnng time.

Here are my thoughts. (I'm new to Veeam so any opinions or advice are welcome)
I'd like to run as many incremental backups as possible without corrupting the backup chain. My plan was to do a full backup to an external drive of all VMs either monthly or however long I can leave the incrementals on the Veeam server. Should I convert my backup chain to a do 30 full increment restore points and transform all current restore points (including all the full backups I have) to a synthetic full forward incremental job. My understanding is that this will keep one full backups stored and delete the previous one.

Thanks in advance.

[emachabert]

I don't get exactly what you want regarding the daily rotated hard drive

I understand you want to do a daily backup of your VMs, with 60 or more restore point, and also a daily copy of this backup to an external, rotated, hard drive ?

For reducing the backup footprint on the target storage, you should look at the forever incremental mode (incremental with no full, active or synthetic) to reduce the amount of space used by the backups.

[kpin]

The daily rotation of the external drives is just a backup of our backup server (Veeam server) We have a few other things that backup to it and we just do a Windows server backup daily and rotate hard drives. This is for disaster recovery purposes. It never was an issue before but now the way a full backup is being ran every 7 days it causes the windows server backups to go from incremental to a full backup.

Basically I think I just want incremental backups and once a month run a full backup to an external drive. Pretty simple, but I was reading how its not a good idea to push just increments too far because it can cause the restore points to become corrupt.

[Shestakov]

Hello Keith,
I`d suggest to use backup copy job to for copying backups offsite. Just make it run once a month to create only 1 restore point. You can also be interested in GFS retention. It`s designed for keeping historical backups.

Basically I think I just want incremental backups and once a month run a full backup to an external drive. Pretty simple, but I was reading how its not a good idea to push just increments too far because it can cause the restore points to become corrupt.

If you use Surebackup for the recoverability purposes, you don`t need to worry about data corruption.
This topic describes it in details. Please review.

Thanks!

[kpin]

I simply want to run daily incrementals and monthly full backups or maybe even bi monthly full backups. I can easily run the Reverse Incremental backups and monthly fulls with a 90 day restore point setting. Reverse allows more restore points. Is there any reason I should consider forward incremental that takes up more space?

[Shestakov]

Keith,
Forever forward incremental method doesn`t require more space in comparison with reverse one and shows better performance.
However, it`s up to you, reverse increments also work fine. Thanks!

[kpin]

What would be my best option for copying a Full Active Backup to an external USB hard drive? I decided to go with Forward Incrementals Daily with 1 Monthly Full Active to our Backup Server. I'd like to simply copy that Full Active once it's finished to a USB External Drive. I'll swap these monthly.

[Shestakov]

If you want to make Active fulls and copy them offsite, as I said, you can use backup copy jobs with GFS retention.
However, if you want to simply copy backup files offsite, you can use File copy job.
Thanks!

[kpin]

Does this sound like a good setup?

I have forward Incremental backups running daily stored on our backup / Veeam server. I have enough space to keep 60 incremental and 1 monthly active full. I would like to copy a full backup to an external hard drive monthly rotating hard drives so I have created a backup copy job to keep 2 restore points and run 1 monthly backup. The storage is set to rotating hard drives. My goal is to keep quarterly backups for a year and have a yearly backup stored for lets just say 10 years. Is this the best way to do this? To me it seems like unnecessary backups being ran. I'll be doing two full backups of the same thing correct?

Or should I be doing a File copy job at the end of each month and copy the just made full active backup from my already existing job? And I'm assuming a file copy job can't be setup until that full backup is completed correct?

[Shestakov]

First scenario sounds more stable. In the GFS options you need to set quarterly=4, yearly=10. You will also have 2 "recent" restore points of the last 2 months.

To me it seems like unnecessary backups being ran. I'll be doing two full backups of the same thing correct?

Not really. Backup copy job doesn`t make backups, but copies existing restore points. So that looks like the way to go for you. Thanks!