Best Practice Request - Daily Hot Reverse Inc. with USB Offsite

[powerfix]

Hi All,

I've been struggling with this configuration for almost 3 months but I've reached the end of my knowledge (and tether).

Environment:
Hot: 1 x VMWare ESXi 6.5 with a VM and local 4TB SSD Raid-10 for local hot backup. This is running reverse incremental every 2 hours with 600 restore points. Working as expected.
Offsite: 5 x 4TB rotated USB 3.0 hard drives.

Expectation:
Ideally, during the hours of 6:00pm and 6:00am the most recent FULL reverse incremental file is copied to the attached USB drive (these will be rotated every night and need to be a fully independent source of backup, not incremental). Each drive could hold up to 3 full backups and/or purge oldest file if required.

What I've tried:
Backup Copy - seems to only copy the most recent incremental file, not the full file, meaning they are reliant on the full backup file and potentially other USB drives. Also doesn't seem to honour the retention scheme
File Copy - allows me to select the most recent full backup file, but due to the filename changing it's not a long term solution.

Can someone smarter than me please educate me? I feel like I'm missing something extremely basic and cannot for the life of me see it.

Thanks in advance,

Craig.

[veremin]

- Add USB drive as rotated drive repository
- And make sure it gets erased before backup copy job runs (this way it will create only full backups there)

Thanks!

[powerfix]

Thanks for the reply.

I've already got the repository configured as you've said, but not sure how I'd be able to keep more than 1 full backup file if we erase it each time?

I would have though for GFS rotation there would be a fairly straightforward way?

Cheers,

Craig.

[veremin]

Is it necessary that recent restore point created by backup copy is full backup? I'm wondering because the easiest solution seems to be daily backup copy without any GFS retention or drive erasing script. Thanks!

[powerfix]

OK, so the theoretical problem I have is with above scenario:

1. You have 3 rotated USB off-site drives (Disk 1 = Full reverse backup, Disks 2/3 have incremental backups)
2. Disaster happens.
3. Most recent backup to be restored is on Disk 3 which is fine.
4. Most recent full backup is on Disk 1.
5. Disk 1 fails.

What happens in this scenario?

[veremin]

Restore process will fail due to unavailable full backup.

You can instruct a backup copy job to create active full backup each time it runs (you can do that via PowerShell), but simple file copy utility that copies file with .vbk extension might work better in your case.

Thanks!