Keeping weekend backups/backup copies available long enough to write them to tape

[bradohunt]

For several years, I have done weekend active full backups at 2 physical locations (location A and location B) and used backup copies to get these backups offsite (location A copies to location B, and vice versa). Once all backups and backup copies complete, I start a tape backup that includes the backups and the backup copies at location A. As a result, both locations' backups are written to tape. I'm writing only the most recent backup chain to tape, and I'm excluding the incremental backups that are run during the week. All of the scheduling is done with a Powershell script, and it has worked well.

We will be adding some additional backups soon that may make it difficult to complete all backups, backup copies and the tape backup over the weekend. If the tape backup does not complete prior to Monday night's incremental backups, I expect the weekend backups will still be untouched and available to write to the weekend tape. However, I expect the backup copies (which contain only 1 backup chain) will be edited/appended, and the weekend version will no longer be available to write to tape. This is the problem I'm trying to solve.

I expect the answer is to use GFS at least for the backup copies, but I have to select a particular day to create the synthetic full. That presents a problem because of my backup window. The Thursday night incremental backups start at 8:45pm and usually complete before midnight. The backup copies then run, and some will complete after midnight. Friday night full backups start at 8:45pm, and some of the backups and backup copies complete before midnight but others continue through Saturday and sometimes into Sunday. So, there is the potential for two or zero instances of the same backup copy to run on a given day. If I could specify a range of 8:45pm Friday to 8:45pm Monday for the backup copy synthetic full, that would probably work, but I don't believe that's an option. If there is a way to manually run a backup copy synthetic full as part of my Powershell script, that would probably work as well.

Basically, I'm just looking for a way to keep the weekend backups and backup copies untouched and available long enough to write it all to tape before the next weekends' backups and backup copies run... and I don't want to interfere with the incremental backups and backup copies during the week. Any ideas?

Brad

[Eamonn Deering]

Are you on Veeam enterprise?

[bradohunt]

Thanks for replying. Yes, I'm on Veeam Enterprise (not Enterprise Plus).