Daily Backups dropped to Weekly backups after 7 days

[joshwinters]

All,

I've searched around the forums for awhile and didn't find anything enlightening yet, so I hope someone can help me.

My company has a fairly large infrastructure with about 50 TB of total data on disk on NetApp NFS mounts. We are running Veeam on a baremetal HP DL380 G9 with 100 TB of SAS over DAS.

We have determined our needs are to take a FS (father-son) approach to backups. We'd like to keep 7 days worth of backups, but after the 7 days, to keep weekly backups up to 30 days. We cut tapes every week and bring them offsite.

Server Group A: 2x per day
Server Group B: 3x per day
Server Group C: Every Hour
Server Group D: Once per week

What's the best way to configure Veeam to handle this approach? I currently have reverse incrementals configured for all server groups. I tried looking at backup copies - but I'm concerned about how much duplication I'm going to get on our disk by doing that.

Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[Shestakov]

Hello Josh and welcome to the community!
I would create a separate backup job for each Server Group with the corresponding schedule.
Am I correct saying that you need GFS retention on tapes only?

If yes, you can create a media pool called “Weekly” with retention period equal to 4 or 5 weeks, configure a backup to tape job and point to the “Weekly” media pool, choose those backup jobs as the source and schedule the tape job to run on weekly basis. This way all backups created during a week will be moved to tapes.

I tried looking at backup copies - but I'm concerned about how much duplication I'm going to get on our disk by doing that.

Do you mean copying backups to the same disk repository with enabled hardware data deduplication?
Thanks!

[joshwinters]

Thanks for the reply Nikita,

Are you saying I should have 2 separate backup jobs for each server group? One backup job would be the normal RPO (2x daily, 3x, daily, hourly, etc) and the other backup job would be for weeklys? I thought backup copies would be a better approach since it doesn't impact the production environment when the copy is performed.

We are copying backups to the same exact disk repository but we do not have a hardware dedupe appliance. We are using volume-level dedupe in Windows Server 2012 R2.

Thanks again!

[veremin]

What Nikita meant is that if you weekly points need to be stored on tapes only, then, you can just create additional backup to tape job and let it copy data to tapes once a week.

Otherwise, if you need weekly restore points to be stored on both tapes and secondary repository, you'll have to use combination of backup copy and backup to tape jobs.

Speaking about Windows 2012 R2 Deduplication, what's average size of your backup file?

Thanks.

[Shestakov]

Josh,
I`m also curious what is the point of storing 2 copies of backup files on the same disk repository besides the tape copies. We recommend 3-2-1 backup rule in general.
Is your policy to have 2 or 3 copies of backups?
Thanks!