Monthly backups - advice needed

[negendahl]

Hi,

I am in need of some assistance.
I am in the process of reconfiguration out backup plan, the guy before me set all jobs to reverse incremental, out NAS couldn't handle the random IO, really slow speeds - long story short, i changed our daily backups to run forward incremental - and the daily backups are fine, what i am struggling with is to find the best option for our monthly backup, here is what i need:

1. Backup once a month (incremental with active / synthetic full? Backup copy jobs? Script to copy the latest VBK file?)
2. The monthly backup goes to a off site repository
3. Monthly backup needs to go 4 years back - the guy before me made a reverse incremental job, once a month, 48 restore points.

As you can see in my first bullet, what i am mostly struggling with is finding the correct strategy for this, any advice or specific configuration would be appreciated.

/Mick

[foggy]

Mick, the most straightforward way to achieve this is using a backup copy job with 1 month interval that will be copying latest state from you regular daily backup chain to offsite repository. What kind of link do you have to the remote site? Do you need to have each monthly restore point as a full backup (VBK) or you're ok with incremental chain of monthly backups?

[negendahl]

Hi Foggy,

Thanks for your fast reply, i have looked at backup copy jobs, but i find the scheduling a bit confusing to be honest and i might need some explanation of what Veeam exactly does and what files it creates.
My test backup copy job i configured like this:

Copy every - 30 days
Added job from Backup
Restore points to 48 (4 years?)
Schedule - Continuously

Wound i achieve with the above configuration a copy interval of 30 days, meaning that every 30 days it would copy the newly created flies to the repository?
I don't need to have a full backup every month, a incremental chain would be fine. Between the locations i have a 1Gbps MPLS link, i achieved speeds around 100mb/s doing normal incremental backup.

[foggy]

Yes, the described configuration should work. Just a small correction, backup copy does not "copy the newly created files" but rather synthetically creates required restore points in target location from VM data stored in source backup repository.

[negendahl]

Alright - so it creates a new restore point at the repository based on the changes from the last file it has?
I would archive a restore point pr. month, containing all changes happened since last sync?

For example:
I create a new backup copy job, seeded from a newly created full backup, when my 30 days have past (lets say its at the end of the month) the sync process to look at my daily incremental job, and sync all changes into a single file at my off site repository?

I apologize, but I'm very interested in finding out how it work, not just getting it to work

Again, thank you.

[foggy]

Yes, your understanding is correct.

[negendahl]

Yes, your understanding is correct.

Great - i will start configuring immediately!
Thank you for the help and advice.

A good day to you.
/Mick

[foggy]

Feel free to ask for additional clarification, if required.

[negendahl]

Hi Foggy,

One lase question - if i want them all to run on the first of the month (or there about) could i create all my jobs, run them once to verify veeam is happy, then on the first of june (in 13 days) enable them all, and force a sync - will this force the schedule to run around the first of every month?

[veremin]

Yes, that should do the trick. If you want to start a new interval in automatic fashion, you can use this script. Thanks.

[negendahl]

Yes, that should do the trick. If you want to start a new interval in automatic fashion, you can use this script. Thanks.

Awesome - thank you.

[veremin]

You're welcome. Don't hesitate to let us know, should any other help be needed.