VEEAM - End of Term/Year Procedures

[CHiLL]

I am looking to improve on the school's backup procedures and would like to introduce end of term and end of year backups. We are currently using VEEAM Backup and Replication 9 and running reverse incremental jobs on all of our servers to a SAN with a 30-day retention policy. However I am wondering what the best method may be to implement End of Term/Year jobs for our 4 essential data servers which include our staff and student file servers, SIMS and CMIS. I have a small NAS device that I can put 2x 3TB drives in, and I would like to be able to have jobs that run once per term and one at the end of the year so I can archive off those backups into a fire safe. I know I could use scripts to backup to somewhere else, but I would like to keep the job within VEEAM with all of the others.

 

I'm not sure that type of job to use: Backup Job or VM Copy.

 

Earlier today I created a standard backup job with 1 restore point to keep on disk. This is pointing to our SAN (which has enough space) as a test, and it is estimating that these 4 servers would take approximately 4.9TB of space. Though after deduplication and compression, I suspect that to be considerably lower.

 

For a one off backup that is purely for data retention, what do people recommend for this?

 

Edit: I'd like to point out that the drives in the small NAS will be removed and archived for that year. So the backups would essentially be a 'one off'. For example, the 'Term 1' disks created in December would only be re-used for the next 'Term 1' backup the following December. So I would want the data on the disks to be overwritten, rather than an incremental or have issues if the disks are formatted before use.

Edited May 9, 2016 by CHiLL

[PotNoodleTech]

Yes you can use a Backup Copy Job for that. Create backup copy job to the NAS but set it to be a manual run rather than scheduled, pop the drives into the NAS then run the backup copy job. you can set the grandfather/father/son retention policy or number of backups to keep.

 

Personally I think you'd be better off using external 6TB USB drives and plugging them directly into the Veeam server then running a backup copy job to them. having a NAS just to have it turned off/unplugged most of the time seems overly complex/waste of money. (unless you already have the NAS, of course!)

[mikkydoos]

Why do that? The backups will be months old if you ever need to use them.

[CHiLL]

Yes you can use a Backup Copy Job for that. Create backup copy job to the NAS but set it to be a manual run rather than scheduled, pop the drives into the NAS then run the backup copy job. you can set the grandfather/father/son retention policy or number of backups to keep.

 

Personally I think you'd be better off using external 6TB USB drives and plugging them directly into the Veeam server then running a backup copy job to them. having a NAS just to have it turned off/unplugged most of the time seems overly complex/waste of money. (unless you already have the NAS, of course!)

We do have an old NAS device that has been sat on a shelf for the best part of 18 months doing nothing and can take up to 4x 3TB drives.

If I were to do this, the first job run would create the vbk/vbm files on the drives, which would then be removed. If another set of disks is inserted and the job re-run, would it complain that the original jobs/files/database/or whatever is missing?

 

Why do that? The backups will be months old if you ever need to use them.

I'd like to extend the period that we can recover data. Our current data retention is 30 days for VEEAM backups and up to three months for volume shadow copy. We have had instances where staff and students have accidentally deleted work from the previous year and they haven't worked on it since and would like it back.