Moving from reverse incremental to SOBR with capacity tier

[entropyiv]

Hi Everyone,
I have been reading about SOBR and GFS settings for a couple weeks now and I haven't been able to get my head around it well enough to figure out how to get from A to B. I was hoping someone could tell me what the best path would be to move from my current setup to something that will let me use S3 compatible storage for long term retention.

First, here is my current setup:
Veeam B&R 11, license Enterprise Plus
I have a two simple repositories. One for machine backups and one for the Veeam config.
All machine jobs are set up as reverse incremental. (This made the most sense at the time to ensure that any restore from tape would only require a single file.)
I have a tape job that runs an active full backup every Sunday and gets all backup files. I keep those for four weeks.
I manually run that same active full backup tape job on the first business day of the month, and that goes off site.
I keep the Monthly tapes for 12 months, and the December EOM (first business day of January) tapes for 10 years.

My goal would be to only store the Monthly and Yearly full backups files in the S3, and continue to use my tape jobs for the on site weekly.
I know I can convert my main simple repository to SOBR to add the capacity tier S3, but what is the correct path to achieve getting only the Monthly and Yearly fulls into the S3 storage?

Thank you in advance for any insight!

[Brad.Barker]

Hello Mike!

There are a few things that you'd want to do in order to achieve what you're looking to do.

First, you'd want to move from Reverse Incremental Backup to Forward Incremental with Weekly full backups. Synthetic full backups tend to be the better option for the weekly full backups, but the actual best option between synthetic full backup vs active full backup depends on the initial storage target. If you're repository initial repository is Linux with XFS or Windows with ReFS though, you'll definitely want to lean towards synthetic full backups for example. The other aspects of moving away from Reverse Incremental Backups is that they're deprecated in the current release of Veeam Backup and Replication. I would recommend taking a look at the retention behavior documentation for forward incremental so you can see how the backups will behave compared to what reverse incremental backups: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/archive/ba ... thods.html

Second, you'd then build out your SOBR with the capacity tier added to it. You'd de-select the "Copy" option and then select the "Move" option when configuring the Capacity Tier option. The "copy" option creates full redundancy between the local repository and the S3 compatible repository, which would include the daily restore points that you're looking not to send to the S3 storage. The "Move" option comes with a configuration option for a number of days before offloading data. Here you'd want to set your move operation to be more than what your local daily retention is, so that backups are only moved when they fall into your GFS retention for the monthly backups. Take a look at the "Move" operations functionality here: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/archive/ba ... _move.html

Finally, for your tape jobs, as long as your regular backups run their synthetic full backup on Saturday night and the tape jobs is Sunday morning, or the synthetic full backup run Sunday before your tape jobs run, then there shouldn't be any issues with getting the full backups to tape though this would only capture the full backup. The real question I'd have with the weekly tape backups is whether you're trying to take the incremental backups as well. If you are, then you may want to actually run the tape job the day before your synthetic full backup if you only want to run the tape job once a week.

Hope this helps!