Multiple Jobs for Single Server

[JamesieA]

Hi all,

I'm trying to revise our backup strategy to allow regular short-term backups, with more infrequent long-term backups. I understand the GFS cycle and how to implement it, but the issue with that is that each backup retained for the GFS schedule is a full, so would cause us storage issues.

The current configuration for certain servers is to have one job running on weekdays to create incrementals, and those being retained for around 2 weeks. A separate job then runs monthly, but also creates incrementals, which are kept for 1 year. By doing this, we have only 1 full backup file for each job, with all others being incrementals. Although the long-term job's incrementals are larger than the short-term job, they are still considerably smaller than full backups.

Is this viable or will the 2 jobs interfere with each other, effectively rendering the long-term incrementals invalid if they were based on the last full backup from the short-term job, which is gone a day later? In terms of timing, we don't have an issue as I can run the long-term backup at the weekend when the short-term job isn't running.

For clarity, we use NAS storage for backups, with each having 36TB capacity. Switching to a GFS cycle would mean the backup copy job's full backups of our main file server would be too big to fit on a single NAS. I'm sure storage experts could combine these to present a single block of storage, but that isn't an option at the moment. Neither is archiving off the old data on the file server that is clearly not changing in a year.

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi James and welcome to the Veeam Forums!

Your configuration seems valid taking into account limited storage options. Two jobs will not interfere CBT(changed blocks tracking) and will do valid incremental backups no matter what.
To add some more savings, please consider:
- playing with Job Compression levels, if you have spare CPU and RAM on Veeam Proxy, that might save you up additional space, which in your case could be spare TBs to use!
- check out Exclude options, especially for Long-Term job - you need it to restore old data, not the entire server(right?). So (maybe) there is no need to backup like SCSI(0:1) with guest OS at all?
- considering disk based storage available, lots of organizations go for Tape Backups with unbeatable price $\TB. That is still one of the most efficient and cost effective ways to keep vast amount of data archives for years. You could keep short-term chain on disk and offload long-terms to tape.

Hope that helps!

[JamesieA]

Hi Egor. That's very helpful, thanks.

I'll take a good look through the other options for future plans, but it's good to know that we can overlap different jobs for now.