Running daily and hourly job for same VM at same time?

[morty]

I have two forever-forward backup jobs backing up the same VM.

One is an hourly backup running on the hour keeping 48 restore points and the other is a daily backup at 10pm on the hour keeping 7 restore points.

Is Veeam smart enough to not cause conflicts when both the hourly and daily job run at 10:00pm?

[Shestakov]

Hello Ryan and welcome to the community!
You cannot backup VM with 2 backup jobs in the same time.
However, if you use GFS retention, VBR is smart enough not to create 2 backups of the same time, but to just mark a backup as both daily and weekly.
Thanks.

[morty]

I don't see the option for gfs retention in the UI? v9.5 U3

[foggy]

Is Veeam smart enough to not cause conflicts when both the hourly and daily job run at 10:00pm?

Yes, it is smart enough - the job that starts second will wait for the first one to "release" the VM.

I don't see the option for gfs retention in the UI? v9.5 U3

Nikita talks about the backup copy jobs, which might be a better option to achieve what you're after.

[morty]

Hmm, there's two conflicting answers here

You cannot backup VM with 2 backup jobs in the same time.

and

Yes, it is smart enough - the job that starts second will wait for the first one to "release" the VM.

Which one is correct?

edit: the reason I don't want to use backup copy job is that I don't want a full backup copy which gfs would do. I want to use forever-forward to keep my limited space open.

[Shestakov]

No contradictions here. The jobs will not run simultaneously. One job will wait for another to finish.

[foggy]

You can have a regular hourly job and a backup copy that runs daily and has 7 restore points in a secondary location.

[morty]

Great thank you.

The backup copy to a secondary location would be 7 full backups though, right?

[Shestakov]

Backup copy job with simple retention uses forever forward method, so you will have one full backup and 6 increments.

[morty]

Ok sorry for all the questions. I read the documentation but I'm still confused about one more scenario.

If I have a backup job that is doing an hourly backup and only has 24 (1 day) restore points. Can I then create a backup copy job that runs every 7 days? I don't understand how this would work because it would be missing 6 days of incremental chains necessary to have a complete backup, wouldn't it?

[foggy]

Yes, backup copy will just copy the latest available VM state.

[morty]

Alright, so if my end goal here is to have the following strategy while using the least amount of storage possible:

Hourly with 24 restore points (1 VM)
Daily with 7 restore points (All VMs)
Weekly with 4 restore points (All VMs)
Monthly with 3 restore points (All VMs)

I should set up 4 total backup jobs (1 for each of the above) using forever-forward? This would mean I'd have 4 full copies, 1 for each job and the rest incrementals. I should skip using backup-copy jobs because I can't use simple and GFS would create additional full copies. Is this correct?

[foggy]

You can go with 4 regular jobs, just keep in mind that each of them will affect production VMs each time they run. As an alternative, you could have two backup copy jobs pointing to the daily regular job, one with 7 days copy interval and 4 restore points retention and another with 30 days copy interval and 3 restore points retention (both without GFS enabled, so they will have 1 full and the rest of increments each).

[morty]

Excellent, thank you for the help. We run backups off business hours anyway (other than the hourly job) but I'll definitely consider using the backup copy scenario you mentioned.

[Shestakov]

If you don't want to run active full backups, I would suggest to use Surebackup for recoverability checks.

[morty]

If you don't want to run active full backups, I would suggest to use Surebackup for recoverability checks.

Thanks I was unsure what that was but after reading up on it I might consider this.

As for the backup copy jobs, I don't think I can do that because the job fails with "Restore point is located in Backup Copy target repository and cannot be used as a source".

Therefore, I can't create simple weekly copies, etc. on the same backup repo. We already use copy jobs to tape but it's interesting I can't copy a restore point to the same backup repo.

[foggy]

Just add another repository pointing to another folder on the same device.