Veeam Backups, GFS and duplication

[TechMonkey]

Can I just layout my backup plan and someone tell me if I am being OTT or being silly.

 

So we have a daily reverse incremental running of all our VMs with a full backup running Friday evening so it can continue into the weekend. We have a retention policy of 11 of these to have 2 weeks & 1 day available. There is then a Backup Copy carried out on that job to a NAS in a remote part of the site.

Now I didn't realise we didn't have any monthly or weekly backups so I have created a GFS retention policy. To do this I created a copy job that pulls the 3 weekly points, 2 Monthly points, 3 Quarterly points and 1 yearly point. This job was then duplicated so that same regime was copied on to our remote NAS.

 

Here is where I get a bit stumped. The Copy jobs ask for how many restore points to keep and has a minimum of 2 allowed. But this means that I will have the 11 days of the main copy plus the last 2 days copied twice.

 

So is my backup policy silly? Should I just run 2 weeks and then use the GFS to archive to our remote site and leave it like that? Should I worry about those random 2 days that are being kept everytime?

 

Ta muchly in advance!

[Steve21]

Think there's a bit of confusion in there unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean.

 

Basically the "2 restore points" are the minimum the backup copy needs to function, (We've increased ours to 4) and these are incremental copies only of the latest backup you have and will be deleted whenever you hit your maximum number. When they hit the schedule you set e.g. week/month etc, it'll copy the data into a full-restore point these are kept until your limit is hit.

 

As you've got it setup you're gonna have the backupcopys running daily, and doing gaining nothing from it, as you won't hit your "weekly/monthly" one so it's not going to copy anything new in. So for example, we have the backup copy to run every 7 days. (Not 1 by the sounds which you have). We keep the 4 weekly incrementals on the backup copy.

 

We then keep 12 Monthly Fulls, and 4 Annual Backups giving a total of 5 years backup via backup copy. (On top of our normal 30-60 dailies depending on server etc) Might want to have a flick through this one as explained ours in a bit more detail: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/enterprise-software/171920-veeam-backup-patterns.html

 

Now in terms of your NAS copies, do you want both primary and NAS to have access to all the backups? As if you're only putting the GFS on the NAS (as an example) if that dies you've lost months/years of backups. What might make more sense is to do the normal backups and GFS backupcopy to your primary storage. Then use a "copy" job (Note not-backupcopy) to copy the folder over to the NAS. This means it won't impact any VMs etc with it's backup/snapshots as you've already done it. And ends up with a replica of all backups in 2 locations?

 

If that makes sense?

 

Steve