Backup Copy of a Backup Copy (Retention)

[George_Lenzer]

My employer has a retention policy for backups that consists of:

-Two weeks of daily backups
-Two months of weekly backups
-Six months of monthly backups

I've recently started building a new Veeam infrastructure to support the integration of another company into ours. There are about nine remote sites which come over a fraction of our 50 meg links (could be 10 megs, could be 2 megs per site). Right now I have local VMware VM backups (two week retention with full backups happening on Saturdays) working at almost all the sites. Just last week I set up the backup copy jobs to bring two weeks worth of the local backups to a central DR site. This satisfies the first leg of our retention policy (Two weeks of daily backups)

I now want to set up backup copy jobs at that DR site to fulfill the two month and six month portions of the retention policy. Based on what I read regarding the explanation of backup copies, is my assumption correct that if I build jobs to retain VM backups for those longer periods and different intervals, that they will be built using repository data from multiple sources based on what Veeam determines to be the most effective? If so, does that mean that these other backup copies will likely be built using mostly the data that is local to the DR site repository, only pulling from the remote sites as needed? On of my concerns is to avoid needlessly copying data from the remote site to the DR site that is already local to the DR repo. My understanding of the documentation is that there shouldn't be a need to pull everything from the remote site since my backup copies contain that data already. Essentially, my new backup copy jobs will be copied from the existing data of the current backup copy jobs. Is that understanding correct?

This is the excerpt from the Veeam documentation that I'm referring to:

Veeam Backup & Replication does not necessarily use a backup created by one job and one backup repository as a source of data. It can copy VM data from backups created by different jobs and even from different backup repositories. When you set up a backup copy job, you only define what VM(s) you want to process. During the backup copy job, Veeam Backup & Replication searches for the most recent restore point in all available backup repositories, copies data blocks from it and saves them to a backup file on the target backup repository

From this location: http://helpcenter.veeam.com/backup/80/v ... point.html

We're on Veeam 8.0.0.2084.

[foggy]

George, why don't your consider just enabling GFS retention in your offsite backup copy job to meet all the requirements with a single job?

[George_Lenzer]

GFS makes perfect sense! I was not aware of GFS, so thank you for pointing it out. If I read that description correctly, then I want to:

1. Check the "Keep the following restore points for archival purposes" in my job
2. ...and set weekly backup to, 8 (two months of weekly)
3. ...and set monthly backup to 6 (six months of monthly)

If that's correct, this is a super easy approach to what I need!

George

[veremin]

If that's correct, this is a super easy approach to what I need!

Correct. Though, 8 weekly points wouldn't give you exactly two months, as some times number of weeks within two months might reach 9. Thanks.

[foggy]

Also, keep in mind that GFS restore points are separate full backups, so make sure to allocate appropriate space in your repository.