Secondary Target

[simcfc73]

Hi,

I'm trying to get my head round the secondary target option on my new(ish) Veeam install. I've come from DPM which seemed more obvious.

What I want is a weekly backup to my secondary target so I can save 6 months worth of backups on my external hard drives.

I've set it to point to the rotating hard drives as a secondary target.

I've set it to periodic copy pruning every 7 days and to keep 26 restore points.

It just seems to fill up the hard drives and never prune them.. I've got a backup on the hard drive dated January.

Am I doing something the wrong way round.

Also, how do you know which rotated hard drive hold what data?

[simcfc73]

So this bit

When you specify retention settings for a backup copy job targeted at a backup repository with rotated drives, you must define the number of restore points per drive. For example, if you set retention to 7, the job will keep 7 restore points on every drive in the set.

So if I set it as 26 every drive will try and save 26 restore points?

I must be missing something as that means its not a rotating tape pattern if every tape holds the whole restore point map.

[Natalia Lupacheva]

Hi Simon,

so, you have Backup Copy job working with Rotating drive as a target. It's run weekly and you are trying to configure the correct retention, right?

Using Simple Retention policy, you can configure the number of the restore points to keep on target backup repository.

In this case, forever forward incremental chain will be created (always synthetic full + 25 incremental backups).
You can find animated description of this retention policy in this KB.
Also, please take a look at this thread to get more details on similar discussion.

Thanks!

[simcfc73]

Ok, very convoluted way to do it and I'm struggling.

I want a weekly backup onto rotating drives for offline purposes.

I've got periodic pruning set to 7 days. I've got the restore points to keep at 26.

I've got a disk with 8tb of data on it with no space so I need to change the retention on it.

I can't actually see the disk to recover the data on it although the disk is listed.

[Natalia Lupacheva]

Hi Simon,

ok, now I'm confused.
If you need to keep 26 restore points - you should configure 26 points on retention config (as it is described here: When you specify retention settings for a backup job targeted at a backup repository with rotated drives, you must define the total number of restore points that you want to retain on all drives in the set. For example, if you set retention to 14, the job will keep the total of 14 restore points across all drives.).

I've got a disk with 8tb of data on it with no space so I need to change the retention on it.

Do you mean you need to decrease the number of restore points due to lack of free space on the drive?
Or do you see that retention did not work and there are more than 26 restore points kept on drive?

Thanks!

[simcfc73]

But this bit on the help site says

NOTE:

When you specify retention settings for a backup copy job targeted at a backup repository with rotated drives, you must define the number of restore points per drive. For example, if you set retention to 7, the job will keep 7 restore points on every drive in the set.

The disk was full of stuff from January which want deleted fro some reason. I've set the registry to delete these now.

[Natalia Lupacheva]

Hi Simon,

yes, you are right, for backup copy jobs it's configured per drive.

As far as I got from your posts - you have one drive and retention policy set to keep 26 restore points. Correct?
If you have set retention policy to 26 points and the drive keeps more than 26 points - please open a support case to gather all logs for your exact case.


Thanks!

[simcfc73]

No worries, I dumped the rotating drives as they didnt work as I wanted.

I've created a new backup job per external disk now and set a retention policy for that.

[soncscy]

Hey Simon,

I've set this up for clients, and you're confusing what the interval does. Read the interval section a few times for Backup Copy and realize it's about point selection, not about number of points.

Backup Copies will always just take the most recent point for an interval, but the interval depends on how long it's going to wait for a point and also how far back it will look for a point.

I think you needed to do what Natalia said and just set 7 points, but the 6 months target I think is harder to do since you can't do GFS with rotated drives, GFS being your archival points. I've got no idea how DPM did it, but understand that with incremental backups you need to start with a Full backup, so when you rotate, it's going to make a new Full + incremental chain.

I'm not sure of a good schema for you to rotate 6 months unless you have just gobs of drives here, but it really depends on how many drives you have and your total storage per drive.