Quarterly backups only with copy jobs?

[Thrasher1469]

Hello all,

New to the forums here and I was looking for some assistance with setting up Quarterly backups for one of our customers. Our normal retention is to keep 7 daily, 4 Weekly and 3 Monthly but one customer wants to add 3 Quarterly backups. With the recent addition of GFS capability to the backup jobs themselves, we have moved to using only backup jobs and no copy jobs for anything. After looking around, it appears to me that the only way to get a quarterly backup is to either set up a copy job that would keep quarterlies or to set up a separate backup job just for quarterly backups.

Just looking to make sure I'm actually understanding things right and to see if someone can possibly assist in letting me know the best way to go about this. Unfortunately our Architecture team is dead set against using copy jobs but for the life of me, I can't find any other ways to try and get quarterlies.

[Gostev]

Hello!

Spoiler alert: longer term, backup copy job is not a good bet either. We'll be redesigning the retention policy logic there to be inline with the primary job (time based), and as a part of this redesign, we will be removing quarterly backups there as well. The reason, you already explained yourself: too few customers are using quarterly backups.

I suggest simply adding more monthly backups to cover those quarters, for this particular customer. For example, by having 6 monthly, you're basically only missing one quarterly backup (Q3). And if this is not acceptable, then just do 9 monthly backups for this customer.

Thanks!

[Thrasher1469]

Thanks for the info and insight into the future needs that take into account the direction Veeam is going with upcoming updates. I'll get with the Architecture team here and let them know.

The only other option I had thought of would be to possibly create a second job for the customer to keep 3 restore points and use the "Monthly at this time" schedule and have it run on Day 1 (or whatever day of the month you want) and select the months (Jan, April, July and October). I'm assuming that would get what we want, just probably need to make sure that the time selected for the job doesn't overlap with the times the standard retention daily/weekly/monthly jobs. Unless I'm going batty (which is a distinct possibility at this point), that should give us what we're looking for as well and save a little bit on space needed (our architecture team is REALLY stingy about storage space).

[Gostev]

I doubt your approach will help to save disk space, as you're talking about creating an additional completely independent backup chain, with some of its restore points duplicating what is already available in the "primary" backup chain.

YMMV depending on change rate of those systems of course, but I'd expect my suggested approach with 9 monthly full backups to be comparable or more efficient as far as disk space usage, as long as you use ReFS or XFS for the backup repository of course. And much easier to manage with the single job.

For other file systems, yes your suggested approach will be better. However, using other file system for GFS backups does not really match "being stingy about storage space"

[Thrasher1469]

Thanks again for the reply. All things taken into account, it seems like your originally suggested method would be the best option. I'll bring the suggestion to the architecture team and see if I can just implement it that way. It gets what we need and gives the customer a couple additional restore points they may not get contractually but knowing that customer, they will likely ask for some restores that will only be covered by those additional restore points at some time, so we can make them happy (a happy customer is usually a good thing)...I'm sure the architecture team will manufacture something to complain about but they always do that...