Retain Multiple Backup Sets (Full+Incremental)

[RuiMota]

Hello,

I'm a newbie with a mission to configure backup jobs on a recently bought Veeam Backup and Replication 8.
Since my company already has a backup policy retention for backup jobs on physical servers (using shadowprotect), i am currently trying to configure Veeam with the same existing rules.

The current scenario is:
3 NAS Backup repositories (without storage space limitations)
3 VMware HOSTS populated each with multiple VM (1 vCenter appliance included)

Our policy for backup jobs and backup retention is:
1 weekly full backup + incrementals (every 120 minutes) with 5 weeks retention (1 week + incremetals job is considered as one backup set)
1 monthly full backup with 13 months retention ( 1 month job is considered as one backup set)

It seeams that Veeam retention policy uses a different approach using restore points to keep on disk.

I wonder if its possible to configure Veeam so that i can retain booth full backups + incremental for a period of 5 weeks?

Thanks,

Rui Mota

[Shestakov]

Hello Rui and welcome to the forums!
You are correct, Veeam has retention point number approach, which means we need to do a simple math here.

1 weekly full backup + incrementals (every 120 minutes) with 5 weeks retention (1 week + incremetals job is considered as one backup set)

So you need 12 backups a day for 35 days = 420 restore points. You can also set Veaam B&R to run Full backup weekly when needed.
Do you also need to backup your VMs during the night and weekend? If no, you can set a backup window and reduce the number of restore points to keep.

1 monthly full backup with 13 months retention ( 1 month job is considered as one backup set)

Do you want to store the backups on the same or different repository. Note that the best practice is to have at least 2 copies of data on different sites.
Thanks!

[RuiMota]

Hello Shestakov and thanks for the reply!

Yes i need to have non stop backups every 120 minutes during 35 days and 1 full backup every week and all of these must be retained for a period of 7 weeks.
Maybe the solution for this policy is to divide into 2 separate backups as follows:
1 monthly backup job + 420 restore points to be retained in repository 1
1 weekly backup job + 7 restore points to be retained in repository 2

The problem in this solution is that months have variable days (January has 31 days, february 28 or 29 days, etc.) so i dont't know how veeam deals with this variation. On the other hand i also need to keep one full backup per month during 13 months and this could mean that another backup job must be created (i'm already using 2 backup jobs per host with a total of 6 backup jobs).

Thanks

Rui Mota

[Shestakov]

You can set a backup job as was discussed above (420 restore points + weekly Full).
Instead of the second backup job, I`d recommend to set backup copy job, to copy existing backups weekly from the first repository to the second one keeping 7 restore points.

The problem in this solution is that months have variable days (January has 31 days, february 28 or 29 days, etc.) so i dont't know how veeam deals with this variation.

It can be scheduled to run in the last day of the month regadless the number of days there are.

Thanks!