How much restore points for backup and copy jobs?

[filipsmeets]

The goal is to have a retention of 35 days for backup and copy jobs.

Please note that all backup and copy jobs are stored on EMC Data Domains which has a limitation of 60 restore points in one backup chain.

So for a daily backup job, we configure 35 retention points with synthetic fulls on 2 days of the week.
The copy job for this backup job is configured with 35 retention points and 5 weekly (GFS).
What will be the length of the backup chain? One full with 34 incrementals or a 5 weekly with 6 incrementals?

We have another job, only for SQL, which runs every 4 hours. This would create 6 RP/day. So we set the retention to 210 to have 35 days of retention. Correct? This job will also create 2 synthetic fulls per week.
How should we configure the copy job to have the same retention on the copy site? As were are sending the copy job to a Data Domain, we can not set the restore points higher than 60. So setting it to run every 4 hours with the maximum retention of 60 would only give us a 10 days retention.

[DGrinev]

Hi Filip,

1. The length of the backup chain will consist of one full backup with 34 increments. The GFS retention will produce restore points later.
Take a look at Animated Retention Policies/Modes in the knowledge base library that should help you better understand the way restore points are built.

2. That's correct. You can configure the backup copy job to retain the same amount of 210 restore points, but you should select the "Read entire restore point from the source..." checkbox.
A separate backup chain will start anew every time a full backup is created.

The limitation for EMC Data Domains is related only for backup chains that consist of one full + 59 increments = total 60 RPs long.

Thanks!