GFS "template" to get started with

[NerfHerder]

Hi All,
We have been running Veeam for a while now, but have pretty much stuck with the basics until recently.
We have established a SOBR, with the performance tier being local storage on our VBR server, and Wasabi S3 storage for the capacity tier. We had all of our backups as forever forward incremental, but now want to start leveraging GFS policy. To make this work right, it seems we need to determine
1. How many restore points (or restore days?) we are to keep
2. What our GFS "policy" will be (weekly full, monthly full)
3. How many weekly and monthly fulls we will keep
4. Will we use synthetic or active fulls?
5. How long do we keep restore points locally (performance tier) before we move them off to Wasabi capacity?
... and probably a bunch of other key considerations that I can't think of at the moment.

Does anyone have a basic "template" that states "in plain English" the basic backup policy. and then show how that is implemented correctly in Veeam? (we are running version 11)

I keep getting twisted up and confused on what the various retention settings should be on the various screens... and how to have a visual confirmation of what is happening...
If would be so helpful to have a proven starting point / guide that we can go with and tweak from there...

Thanks so much,

[foggy]

I believe the questions should be a bit different - not "how many restore points we are to keep" but "how many do we actually need", no one can decide on the backup/DR policy for you, this is something you need to come up with first and then we will be able to help with how YOUR requirements can be implemented with Veeam B&R. You can search the forums for what other users typically do but should answer yourself what are your requirements in terms of RPO/RTO and what is the acceptable data loss. There's just no universal template for every organization.

[NerfHerder]

Hi - thanks for the reply.
Of course, I agree with you - I was only querying to see if there are any solid end to end examples of a working setup... I would learn from that and adjust to meet our specific RTO, RPO, retention requirements, etc.

So, I have a job that backs up all AD and related servers (ADDS, ADCS, ADFS).
I want to take a backup every day
I want to get a full weekly on Saturdays (synthetic or active? not sure?)
I want to get a full Monthly on the last Saturday of the month
I want to retain the daily increments and a single full on my local storage (SOBR performance tier)
I want to move all other weekly fulls to the SOBR capacity tier, including the monthly full.
I want to retain the weekly fulls and two monthly fulls on the capacity tier (which is set with immutable enabled)

I am not sure if that is stating everything properly... I am just trying to come up with some starting point for a GFS setup that can be expanded upon / tweaked once our organization generates a corporate policy.

Does this make sense?

Also - I was just reading through the Veeam 11 vSphere guide on GFS, and it keeps talking about Backup Copy GFS Methods. Is this meaning that there would be backup jobs and backup copy jobs defined as part of this?
Thanks!

[foggy]

Your requirements make total sense. As for the backup copy jobs - these allow for meeting the infamous 3-2-1 rule but both regular backup jobs and backup copy jobs have GFS retention so you can implement any strategy you find appropriate.