Archiving monthly backups

[bslade]

we have been using B&R for a year now and have 3 jobs configured (by my predecessor);

Daily - 7 restore points, reverse incrementals with deduplication
Weekly - 4 restore points, reverse incrementals with deduplication & CBT
Monthly - 14 restore points, reverse incrementals with deduplication & CBT

We are running out of disk space on the VEEAM server and I'd like to archive off the monthly's.

1. Can I just cut & paste the VRBs onto an external drive & leave the VBK as is?
2. If we ever needed to restore from one of the 'archived' months, can I just copy back the relevant VBKs i.e. the specific month and all the months in between?
3. Will this effect the next monthly job?

At present some VMs are failing within the jobs due to disk space. The idea was that we would always have a years worth but seems our 9TB VEEAM server cant handle this amount of data

I'm thinking that we'll need to reduce our RPO to say 6months so the monthly job has 6 restore points and Archive off every 6 months...

Any help appreciated

Cheers

[PTide]

Hi,

1. Can I just cut & paste the VRBs onto an external drive & leave the VBK as is?

Yes, you can do that.

You need to take your .VBK + .VBRs to some other repo with enough space on it and just map your backup job to that repo. Please refer to this thread and this article.

There is also another option:

First, you reduce your retention period for your current backup job thereby cutting the amount and overall size of backups being stored on your current repo. Then you setup a backup copy job which copies your backups to some other repo as many times a day/week/ as you need and gives you an option of setting a separate retention policy for that backup copy job, so you have exactly needed amount of restore points in your archive.

2. If we ever needed to restore from one of the 'archived' months, can I just copy back the relevant VBKs i.e. the specific month and all the months in between?

Yes, you can.

You have to import your backup file then you can treat it like a regular one.

3. Will this effect the next monthly job?

If you just delete your .VBKs from your current repo without remapping your job to a new one, then you will have to use a forcecreatemissingvbk workaround. So, the answer is "No, if you use any of two other methods described" =)

By the way - you are dealing with days/weeks/months RPO, so I assume that GFS concept may serve you well.

Animated GFS article + thread

Please let me know if that works for you.

Thank you.

[Shestakov]

Hi Ben, Pavel,

Let me chime in.

1. Can I just cut & paste the VRBs onto an external drive & leave the VBK as is?

Actually, it`s not recommended to move parts of the chain to the another repository. .VRBs are not useful without .VBK and if you are not moving the Full backup(.vbk) with them, the increments(.vrb) will not be recoverable. So the second Pavel`s suggestion is the way to go. Or move the whole chain to another repository, map the chain to the job and keep using it as the target for the job.

Thanks.

[bslade]

thanks Nikita/Pavel

All good suggestions....thanks for confirming my thoughts. At the moment I'll need to reduce the monthly retention numbers to bring down the size and hope that all the jobs will complete by month end!

I setup another local repository and configured a test Backup Copy job over the weekend with just our mail & file server but it consumed the whole repo on our mail server. I'll need to read up on the backup copy feature as there where a few confusing options i.e. 'copy every n min/hour/day', 'Number of Restore points' & 'Keep restore points for archival purposes'? Could I not setup an 'Active Full Backup' on a monthly schedule and achieve my goal of archiving off on a monthly basis?

Cheers

[Shestakov]

Ben,

Could I not setup an 'Active Full Backup' on a monthly schedule and achieve my goal of archiving off on a monthly basis?

There is no periodic Active Fulls for the backup copy job. Backup copy job doesn`t make backups, but copies existing restore points. However, you will have Full backups copied from the source job, in a case of GFS retention. Thanks!