VEEAM - Rotating media

[Simcfc73]

Hi,

 

Had a bit of a mare this morning as I was testing my VEEAM and managed to delete my SIMS server. 4 hour restore so I am in the dog house.

 

Just wanted to know if anyone is using rotating media with VEEAM. I'm struggling a bit with the terminology as I've come from DPM.. which had issues but seemed a bit easier when it comes to external backups (IMHO)

 

What I am trying to achieve is a weekly backup to rotating media kept for 4 weeks then a monthly backup saved for 12 months. The GFS option is greyed out on rotating media so I can't use that and the retention policy just gives you the option of how many recovery points to keep.

 

Not sure what happened in March to my backups but they weren't overwritten or updated... looks like it started a new process with new folders on the disks.

 

I've got 4 disks that I want to rotate.

 

I did start this thread http://www.edugeek.net/forums/enterprise-software/211435-veeam-best-practise.html which was helpful in the initial setup.

[Andy2789]

We use Veeam with drive rotation, all our backups are done direct to USB 3.0 encrypted drives. This for us works really well, and is really quick and obviously allows for offsite backups

 

We do it by having a repository for each day (each Drive)

So we have a Monday to Thursday

Then a Friday 1,2,3,4

Month 1, Month 2

 

Then we have 4 backups on each drive with differential backups, we found the best way to do it is to have different repositories for each drive. Though there is the tickbox to allow for cycling drives, with differential backups it gets really upset (not surprising)

 

If there is anything we can help with, shout

[Simcfc73]

Thanks for this. I couldn't work out how your supposed to identify the rotating drives when you need to restore from them.

 

I've set my disks as secondary target but it doesn't work how I want.

 

Have you used secondary targets or just their own jobs per disk? Any chance of screenies of your setup?

 

Trying to get my head round how you've set this up. How many disks do you have?

[Andy2789]

No problem, give me a few mins to get some screen grabs.

 

Finding the right backup to restore is the reason why we have done a repository for each drive and then mapped the jobs against the drive, so we know a Monday job refers to a Monday repository, and a Monday Drive. We don't use secondary targets, we only do a backup direct to the drives.

 

Each Server has 13 Drives but 1 is a Year backup, so it keeps 4 years of Data

[Andy2789]

So these are the jobs that we have got setup, that in the schedule backup the required server(s) and then pointed at the relevant repository, the schedule then matches to run e.g. Friday 3 is told to run on the third Friday of every month and to look for the Friday 3 repository

These are the drives for each of the jobs

 

Then these are the repository which are told are rotating drives, so it keeps up with the lettering. To make it easier we make it so the Repository names the folder after itself, so if someone doesn't change the drive or there is an issue. You can easily identify what is going on

[Simcfc73]

Right ok.

 

I've got standard backup doing 30 days to its internal drives which works great.

 

Just need to figure out how to do the offsite external drives (rotating). Suppose if I have a job for each drive using a weekly backup then a monthly one pointing to the same drive.

[Steve21]

The way we did it is to have 4 weekly jobs (separate to normal backup), that run over weekend and do a full backup to a drive.

 

This way you ensure you always have a full backup linked to each drive, easier restore as each is numbered etc, and you then can have them in multiple off-sites too

 

Steve