We're looking to start moving some backups offsite for disaster recovery and I've been looking at using Backup Copy Jobs to do it. I've read through the Backup Copy for v8 documentation but I can't figure out how to make it work they way I'd like. To meet our DR and budget goals I want to:
1. Take our weekly full backup on Saturday.
2. Start a backup copy on Sunday and ONLY move Saturday's full backup files.
3. Delete previous week's backup copy data so that only one copy of the data is stored in the cloud.
I've thought about turning this into a PowerShell script but I like the idea of having Veeam manage everything and being able to view it all in one place, along with the resiliency that a block-based copy operation gives. (Restarting a failed 2TB file copy process in Windows? No, thanks.) But I can't figure out if there's a way to set this up. I can set a seven-day copy interval, but not specify that it should run on a Sunday. I can set the retention policy to two restore points, but it doesn't look like this will let me only move the full backups. Since this is a cloud solution the more I can avoid read/write access to a cloud gateway the faster, cheaper, and better. Letting Veeam handle synthetic fulls and cleanups will result in a lot of overhead.
Of course, if anyone has alternate methods for offsite backup with Veeam I'm happy to hear about them. Cloud Connect is interesting but so far looks too expensive for us.
Alan, backup copy is always incremental (which is good for offsite backups, right?) and doesn't in fact copy source backup files but only changed blocks corresponding to the latest VM state. So you can have a weekly job with minimum retention of 2 restore points that will copy just changes on a weekly basis and automatically maintain a single full backup with one subsequent increment file at the target location. If your target repository is capable of running Veeam data mover agent (i.e. added to Veeam B&R console as Windows or Linux box), all the synthetic activity will be performed on the target side, not through the gateway.
Very good, thanks! Incremental is something I like, but I've been wary since this has to run completely over the internet. Now that I have a better idea of what it's going to do I'll start playing with it to see what we can do!