Understanding backup copy retention

[marama]

Hi there!

I am having hard time understanding the logic of Backup Copy job retention...

Example:

Job/Copy every "1 day"
Target/Restore points to keep: 4
Target/"Keep the following restore points for archival purposes" checked
Target/"Weekly backup": 1 (Friday 11:30)
Target/Monthly: 0
Target/Quarterly: 4
Target/Yearly: 1

Question:
1. are the restore points for archival purposes ON TOP of "restore points to keep" setting? If I have only 4 restore points to keep, will I ever get get "weekly backup", nad monthly, quaterly and yearly ones?
2. in my example, I deliberatlyx set "monthly" to "0", would I need to set max 3*30 restore points so the quarterly gets reached? Or can I set some 15 restore points but set weekly to 4 (so 7*daily + 4*weekly + 4*monthly)?
3. are the Monthly/Q/Y backups incremental or are they full ones?

Another question...
If I wanted to have the monthly/Quarterly/Yearly restore points on my veeam backup server, I need to set backup job + backop copy job on top of that, right? Is there some better way to do it? I have 1TB VM to backup, and only 4TB HDD. Is there a posibility to have M/Q/Y backups at all?

TIA

[veremin]

1. are the restore points for archival purposes ON TOP of "restore points to keep" setting? If I have only 4 restore points to keep, will I ever get get "weekly backup", nad monthly, quaterly and yearly ones?

Yes, you will.

2. in my example, I deliberatlyx set "monthly" to "0", would I need to set max 3*30 restore points so the quarterly gets reached? Or can I set some 15 restore points but set weekly to 4 (so 7*daily + 4*weekly + 4*monthly)?

No, you wouldn't need to do that.

3. are the Monthly/Q/Y backups incremental or are they full ones?

Full.

Kindly, read the corresponding section of our User Guide; should clarify the mechanism for you.

Thanks.

[marama]

Hi! Thanx for your answer.
But I see not much use for my case (little data change) if GFS is full and not incremental. Is there any way to have incremental instead of full for GFS?
I have 1TB VM, with maybe 2GB daily change. So for me it would eat up less disk space to have 365*incremental backup (1TB Full + 365*2GB = 1.73TB) instead of having backup + GFS backup copy (1TB full for backup + 1TB Full for Copy for copy and then 1TB for GFS each = at least 6TB). Am I missing something?

I understand that for VMs with big changes, full is no problem, but I hate to see multiple 1TB files that have almost similar content. The link you gave me say GFS is good because it "lets you keep backups of VMs for an entire year using minimum amount of storage space.", but how is it possible if it stores full backups, and not incremental (?!).

TIA

[Gostev]

Is there any way to have incremental instead of full for GFS?

No, as this introduces significant recoverability risks (as storage level corruption of a single bad incremental backup may render the entire year of backups unrecoverable). Part of the idea behind classic GFS is providing self-sufficient restore points, so that if one of the restore points gets corrupted, all the other are still unaffected. Our current GFS implementation is designed around this idea to facilitate reliable archives.

[marama]

OK, thanx for the explanation!
Makes sense now.