Year-end backups

[bhagen]

At the beginning of '18 I started new backup jobs to a new repository. I'd like to get "year end" backups of the last jobs that were pointed at the old repository, and put them on tape.

What's the best way to accomplish this?

[Shestakov]

Hello,
Could you explain what do you mean by "year end" backup?
You can schedule a job to run on the last day of the year.
Thanks

[bhagen]

By apologies; I meant year end copies!

I just need a copy of the last backup jobs of last year thrown on tape for archival.

[Shestakov]

Thanks for the clarification.
In this case I would recommend to use backup copy job with GFS retention. You can schedule the yearly cycle on the last day of the year.
Thanks!

[bhagen]

I need to do this "retroactively"; meaning, I have all the backup jobs for 2017 on an older repository, and I - just one time - need to copy those to tape.

It seems if I create a backup copy job with gfs, the job won't run until the end of 2018.

[Shestakov]

The only way to do it now is to restore VMs from the desired restore point and back them up with another job.
Thanks!

[bhagen]

So there's no way to simply copy a .vbk file to tape? Or would that even work if we needed to restore something from that .vbk in the future?

[Shestakov]

You can copy .vbk to tape using file to tape job. Use file copy job to copy the backup to disk repository.
I thought it was one of the increments you wanted to keep as a separate backup.

[bhagen]

Thanks for all your help so far! Each of the jobs I want to copy to tape have a .vbk and 13 .vib files. Since we were doing forever forward incremental backups, the latest incremental falls on 12-29-17. I suppose I could get away with copying the vbk from 2 weeks before the end of the year; but if I wanted the vib from the last day of the year would I need to copy all 14 files, or just the vbk and the last vib?

[Shestakov]

You should not copy VBK and the last .vib as you will not be able to restore from the .vib without the whole chain of .vibs.
So if you want to preserve the restore point from 12-29-17 you either need to copy the chain from .vbk to the .vib or restore VMs from that restore point and backup/VeeamZip them.
Thanks!

[bhagen]

Perfect; thank you again! After looking again, all my .vbk files fall on 12-29-17, and I have .vib files daily past that, so I'll copy the vbk and the next two vib files.

One (hopefully) last question: do I need to copy the .vbm files as well?

[Shestakov]

Yes, it's recommended to keep .vbm with .vbk and .vibs

[GregorS]

I think a proper course of action should be to first create another temporary disk-based repository, then create a one-off backup copy job to consolidate all backup files from the 2017 repository into a single VBK on the temp repository and only then write this to tape.

[Shestakov]

Backup copy job will create a full backup from all available restore points, both from 2017 and 2018.

[bhagen]

Thanks all; I've been out of the office since my last reply and am just getting back to this. I like the idea of doing a backup copy job, then writing that to tape. But I'll have to research backup copy jobs; so far my experience hasn't been what I expected. (I expected to be able to simply create a copy of a backup job; but the only option I have is to do scheduled copy jobs, which doesn't make sense to me at first glance, so looks like it's time to do some learning.)

[Shestakov]

You can run backup copy job once, instead of scheduling it.
Thanks!