Monthly backup copy jobs only

[RaboRemco]

Hi All,

in our Veeam environment we have a policy of creating daily backup copies of everything to a remote site for DR purposes. Backup jobs are grouped by VMware cluster (a single job backs up everything in a single cluster) so we can keep things manageable.

Now, on top of that a selected number of backup clients require a monthly backup to tape for long term retention. So, out initial thought was to create a backup copy job that would copy the existing backups to tape. Unfortunately it seems that backup copy jobs keep at least 2 copies in the daily cycle, which is what we've already covered by the daily backup copy job to disk.

I know I can schedule a backup copy job to run only once every so many days and only on Saturday, but I'm not convinced that it's possible to schedule the job to run exactly once a month on the designated day. Does anyone have any hint of how we could achieve our goal of having a monthly backup of a selected number of backup clients say at the first Saturday of the month every month?

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Rabo!

- First of all, to have a Full Backup on the Tape, you don't really need to have one on the disk. Veeam can synthesize so called Virtual Full from your disk-based incremental chain on the flight, while offloading backup to tape. So in your case, forget about copies, just run Backup to Tape job!
- As for "tricky schedule" question, when Veeam Scheduler is not enough, you can always schedule a Windows Scheduler task that runs on a particular day\month that will run a PowerShell script to trigger required Veeam jobs(that are in "disabled" status). That will do the trick!

Hope that helps!

[RaboRemco]

Hi Egor,

thanks for your pointers, indeed I was looking at the wrong feature. The "Backup to Tape" feature seems to do what we want. It does copy all of the data in a backup job, while we only need a subset of each job, but I guess we can make this work.

[Andreas Neufert]

You can create a BCJ with the minimum 2 restore points and include only the data that you want. Then you it as source for the tape job. This need some extra space, but you can think about it as caching before it goes to tape.