Rotated Drives - rotation concept

[timotheus]

Hello,

I am running B&R 11 Essentials in a small vSphere environment.

To mitigate the ransomware threat I have been tasked with adding an air-gapped copy of our weekly and monthly backups to our setup. Using the Rotated Drives feature seems to fit our needs. I plan on purchasing USB hdds that have more than double the size of our current full backups.

What I am unsure about is how to deal with data retention.

I want to keep weekly backups for 2 months and monthly backups for 6 months.

A primitive method is to handle the drives the way I used to handle tapes when I had a single drive attached to my backup server. One full backup on each. Do a simple father son rotation.

But by design B&R would like to keep three retention points on each hdd. If I understand this correctly, I could use 8 drives, rotated each week, and with time have three restore points on each. This would give me 6 months of weekly backups with fewer drives.

I have two questions about this:

Have I understood the way B&R would manage the retention points on the drives correctly?

Do I get less ransomware protection by connecting the drives to the network more often?

Thanks,
Timotheus

[Mildur]

Hi

Do I get less ransomware protection by connecting the drives to the network more often?

Yes, as long they are connected, backup data on the disk can be destroyed.

Before I go into the questions about rotated drives, I would like to ask you if you have already decided to use rotated drives?
Do you have B&R 11 Essentials VUL licences or sockets? Which edition?
I ask because your licence would probably allow you to use object storage with immutable support.
You would not have to switch the USB drives every day or every week. Everything happens automatically. And object storage is a much more stable backup storage than a USB hard drive.

I want to keep weekly backups for 2 months and monthly backups for 6 months.

Rotated disks doesn't support GFS backup retetion. So there is no weekly, monthly concept here.

Thanks
Fabian

[timotheus]

Hello Fabian,

we have the standard edition.

We also have a server with immutable backups. But they are not air-gapped. If somebody hacked that server they could reconfigure my raid array and destroy my data.

I understand that Rotated Drives does not allow GFS as a feature. It would have to done manually, removing a drive when it is finished and plugging in the next drive in the rotation before the copy job runs. As I said, it is primitive, but manageable.

Considering ransomware attacks. How might I loose everything by connecting the drives every 8 weeks?

[Mildur]

Hi TImtheus

Ok, object storage is not possible with the socket standard edition.
Then rotated drives are a good solution for air gapped backups.

Considering ransomware attacks. How might I loose everything by connecting the drives every 8 weeks?

Yes, you won't loose everything, if the same USB drive is connected all 8 weeks.
Each USB drive contains its own backup chain, which can be used to restore the data without needing backup files from another disk.

I understand that Rotated Drives does not allow GFS as a feature. It would have to done manually, removing a drive when it is finished and plugging in the next drive in the rotation before the copy job runs. As I said, it is primitive, but manageable.

In that case, you can use a periodic backup copy job with an interval of 7 days. Set the retention to 170-180 days (6 months).
The weekly backups will also be retained for 6 months. But's it's the simplest way to configure it.

When you swap the disks, a new full will only be generated when there isn't already a full backup from a previous run. If there is a fullbackup, the backup copy job will generate an incremental backup based on the full backup or last incremental backup on this disk.
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110