Comprehensive data protection for all workloads
Post Reply
pawel
Enthusiast
Posts: 43
Liked: 3 times
Joined: Nov 20, 2014 10:54 pm
Contact:

Retention For Extended Periods of Time

Post by pawel »

Hello,

I've been picking the brains of various support people while on the phone with them and browsing the forums to find a good policy for long term retention (5-10 years) of backup files. I need to be able to restore data from any day in that 5-10 year time frame (eventually I might need to do any data from an hour in that period, but that's not needed right now). Based on those requirements I am doing a forever incremental with 30 restore points and copying my backup repositories to tape before the retention policy deletes them. However, I can imagine inherent problems with this method as time goes by. Mainly. if I need to find an email from 5 years ago for regulator reasons I would have to figure out what tape that email would be on, import that tape, and restore the backup. If the data I'm looking for is spanned over numerous tapes this becomes an even bigger problem.

My backup repository is about 1TB, it grows about 10GB each day. If we pretend for a second that the data grows in a linear way I'll have 4.6TB of data at the end of the first year and 3.6TB added each year after that.

If I can meet the storage requirements what is the best way to set this up? I've looked at GFS retention in backup copy jobs. The problem is I only have the following options:

Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly with 7 restore points.

This doesn't seem to meet the requirement since I can only save data on a weekly basis, I have no way to save data on a daily basis for extended periods of time (am I understanding that correctly?). Is there any way around this?

The other issue that even if it saves data on a weekly basis I have to have a bunch of full backups. If what support has told me is correct if I have 18 weeks of retention configured Veeam will generate a new VBK for each week and at the end of the 18 weeks I would have 18 full VBKs (18TB if each is 1TB). Is that right?
alanbolte
Veteran
Posts: 635
Liked: 174 times
Joined: Jun 18, 2012 8:58 pm
Full Name: Alan Bolte
Contact:

Re: Retention For Extended Periods of Time

Post by alanbolte »

It sounds like GFS retention doesn't fit your needs, because you need daily or better granularity. Your current tape strategy is probably more cost-effective than disks, but you're right that it's not as convenient as on-disk backups. I don't believe we presently have any job types that make having thousands of incremental restore points practical. It might be simpler just to configure the maximum number of daily points in your backup copy job and then start a new backup set on e.g. a quarterly basis. If automation of starting the new set is a concern, I believe you could accomplish that via Powershell, but I haven't tried writing a specific script.

What exactly is it that you need at such high granularity for regulatory requirements? Just emails, or other data as well?
veremin
Product Manager
Posts: 20271
Liked: 2252 times
Joined: Oct 26, 2012 3:28 pm
Full Name: Vladimir Eremin
Contact:

Re: Retention For Extended Periods of Time

Post by veremin »

Speaking about storing backups on disks, backup copy job sounds like the best idea indeed. Starting from version 8 the maximum number of restore point a backup copy can keep is 999. So, you can specify that number, set daily sync interval and start a new set once in 2.5 years. Thanks.
DaveN
Influencer
Posts: 20
Liked: 2 times
Joined: Dec 10, 2015 8:25 am
Full Name: Dave Nienhuis
Contact:

[MERGED] Backup Copy Job

Post by DaveN »

Hallo Veeamers,

I have a question regarding the Veeam Backup Copy Job, in the company I work we have to save certain virtual machines for 10 years.
But i can't realy figure out what options to use and how to set them up.... I want to backup the machines every day/week for a maximum of 10 years long for archival purposes.

Could anyone help me out here?

With kind regards,

Dave Nienhuis
The Netherlands
foggy
Veeam Software
Posts: 21069
Liked: 2115 times
Joined: Jul 11, 2011 10:22 am
Full Name: Alexander Fogelson
Contact:

Re: Backup Copy Job

Post by foggy »

Dave, could you please elaborate on what restore points do you actually need to keep for 10 years: do you need each of the weeklies to be kept for so long or monthlies or probably yearly restore points are enough?
DaveN
Influencer
Posts: 20
Liked: 2 times
Joined: Dec 10, 2015 8:25 am
Full Name: Dave Nienhuis
Contact:

Re: Backup Copy Job

Post by DaveN »

Hello,

Well what would you recommend, we need to keep the data up to date and remove the old data after let's say 10 years.
For example, we are back-upping an server each week so we can add new data, we want to keep that data for 10 years and then be deleted automatically
foggy
Veeam Software
Posts: 21069
Liked: 2115 times
Joined: Jul 11, 2011 10:22 am
Full Name: Alexander Fogelson
Contact:

Re: Backup Copy Job

Post by foggy »

It depends on how granular the probable restore needs to be. I cannot recommend this, since it is based on your business requirements. I just can recommend the job settings that would allow to meet those requirements. Would you need to restore to, say, 24th week of the year three years back? Or restore to the end or beginning of the year would suffice? Typically, GFS retention is configured like, for example, to keep 4 weekly restore points, 12 monthlies to cover the entire last year, and 10 yearly restore points.
DaveN
Influencer
Posts: 20
Liked: 2 times
Joined: Dec 10, 2015 8:25 am
Full Name: Dave Nienhuis
Contact:

Re: Backup Copy Job

Post by DaveN »

Thank you for the quick reply, I was thinking about the first option you said, so that i can restore a week a few years back.
foggy
Veeam Software
Posts: 21069
Liked: 2115 times
Joined: Jul 11, 2011 10:22 am
Full Name: Alexander Fogelson
Contact:

Re: Backup Copy Job

Post by foggy »

Then you need to decide whether you want to have an extremely long chain of increments (54*10), which is prone to failure or store each of them as a separate full backup (space considerations).

Some other considerations are also given in the thread above.
Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Google [Bot] and 246 guests