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GFS Backup to multiple storages

K
Userlevel 1

I have to set up a structure like 7 daily, 4 weekly, 12 monthly and 5 yearly backups for my workplace, but am somewhat restricted in budget and storage space per device, so I have two NAS as backup repository, but each one allone is to small to save all the backups.

Now I am looking for a way to spread the backups over both NAS, e.g. save daily and monthly to NAS A, weekly and yearly to the NAS B. My initial idea would be:

A regular Backup Job for daily Backups, targeting NAS A, set up as

  • Schedule: Run everyday at 9 pm; full backup every saturday
  • Storage
    • Retention Policy: 7 restore points
    • Keep certain fulls longer: unchecked
    • Configure secondary destinations: checked
  • Secondary Target:
    • Weekly Backup Copy Job
    • Monthly Backup Copy Job
    • Yearly Backup Copy Job

My next step is to set up the Copy Jobs, they all share the following settings:

  • Immediate copy (mirroring)
  • Object is the Daily Backup from above
  • Schedule is any time

Depending on the backup the target differs:

  • Repository is either NAS A or NAS B
  • Retention Policy is always two restore points (can’t go lower) - which would be a duplicate of the newest two restore points of the daily backup, right? I don’t need them (I know, I should have a Backup at a different site/ cloud, but as said, no way my boss pays for that)
  • Keep certain backups longer: is set to 4 weekly/ 12 monthly/ 5 yearly

The last two settings are what troubles me the most.

The GFS settings offer me a weekly option “create weekly full on this day”, which I set to saturday for Weekly and leave blank for Monthly/ Yearly, as that is the day the full backup is created for the Daily.
But the monthly option refers to the weekly Backup and asks explicitly for a weekly backup to keep longer - can I just check this box, set it to e.g. “Last” and tell it to keep a dozend Monthly, allthough the weekly Copy is not configured for this specific Copy Job? If I understood the flagging system correct, Veeam should recognize that it has to only create one Copy and flag it weekly and monthly and just delete those flags after different times, thus keeping some Backups (the last weekly of every month) longer, is that correct?

Second question: can I really set the retention policy to the minimum for my backup copies and to seven restore points for the Daily? Will this create a problem with the Copies like the source Backup having allready been purged when the longer cicle of the Copy Jobs triggers?

 

Of course, if the whole setup is going to fail I would be happy to get poked in the right direction to setup GFS over multiple storages. Or if that is impossible at all, at least that would be good to know, and if there is no way to do so, I will have to let my boss decide which risk he want’s to take, but at least I could explain it to him confidently before realising the backups did not work as planned after disaster strikes...

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Best answer by coolsport00 21 March 2024, 13:13

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4 comments

coolsport00
Userlevel 7
Badge +17

Hi @Katschka -

Right off the bat after reading through your post of what you’re wanting to achieve, I can’t see anything standing out as being off-base. The best way to know if your plan will work as desired is to test. You can use “blank” VMs to test with. Obviously, you don’t have to test for the full Yearly amount you want, but just for as long as you notice the behavior being as you anticipate (probably at least a month or 2).

I haven’t used some of the other GFS options, such as “Last” to test that behavior, but from my understanding that sounds correct. The User Guide has more detail on it here , and shows a small example.

And, I don’t think I follow your second question. You can configure, as you share, 2 as minimum for the amount of Restore Point retentions, and 3 for the minimum amount of Days retention. Can you explain further your question here?

Shane Williford - Veeam VMCA/VMCE | Veeam Legend | VUG Leader | VCP-DCV | Twitter: @coolsport00
Chris.Childerhose
Userlevel 7
Badge +20

Based on your setup and details everything appears good for the configurations.  As Shane noted the best thing is to test this due to your limited budget and restraints for storage.  I assume the NAS devices have plenty of storage on either to hold the required data.

Check out the link posted as well as the Veeam Calculator as that let’s you simulate what you are looking to do - Veeam backup capacity calculator

I myself am confused on question 2 as well so please clarify that in this post for further. 

Chris Childerhose - VMCA2022 | VMCE2023 | Veeam Vanguard 7* | Veeam Legend 3* | vExpert 5* | VCAP-DCV/VCP-DCV | Object First Ace | Cisco Champion | Twitter: @cchilderhose | Blog Site – https://just-virtualization.tech
K
Userlevel 1

Thank you for your responses
To clarify the second question: I could not find any info about from which source the GFS exactly creates the longer lasting Backups. As the copy jobs are set up they will copy every daily backup right away as soon as available and keep the last 2 copies as per retention policy

My cycle for the daily backup is a full backup every saturday and incremental backups for the rest of the week. So the GFS-backups will copy the incrementals from sunday and monday, which could be used as the last full is still available. I was afraid that on tuesday the Full copy would be deleted, rendering the copied incrementel useless.
As i cannot set a day for the Monthly/ Yearly I was afraid that Veeam could try to create those from the than maybe useless copies, as the trigger date may e.g. be a thursday.
In the meantime I read deeper into retention policies and I understood that it will keep the whole chain copied for the week, as to explicitly not render the incrementals useless. So no matter when GFS will trigger a Monthly/ Yearly, there will always be a good copied source and of course ther would be a valid original source, although I think from the wording of the Guide that GFS are created from the copied backups, but I could not yet verifiy that.
 

After your feedback and reading further into the matter with your sources  I think I am well set with my structure and will give it a trial period to check wether everything works fine with the first monthly backup and then sleep a little better after may.

(And after that I need to get some off-site capacity out of my boss to sleep good again 😅)

 

Thank you very much

Chris.Childerhose
Userlevel 7
Badge +20

Sounds like you have a sound plan @Katschka be sure to mark one of the responses for best answer so it can help others with similar inquiries.

Chris Childerhose - VMCA2022 | VMCE2023 | Veeam Vanguard 7* | Veeam Legend 3* | vExpert 5* | VCAP-DCV/VCP-DCV | Object First Ace | Cisco Champion | Twitter: @cchilderhose | Blog Site – https://just-virtualization.tech

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