Hi all,
Running Veeam Backup and Replication V11 on an Enterprise license - we have been backing up to HPE StoreOnce repositories for nearly a year, but due to operational changes with more VM’s, additional encryption and retention requirements we are filling these up faster than anticipated (less de-dupe).
We would like to move our older monthly/yearly backups to Azure storage for long term retention in order to free up space on the StoreOnce devices for our nightly/weekly backups and restores.
Initial research suggests that creating a Scale-Out repository, adding the existing StoreOnce repository as the performance tier extant and a new Azure object storage container as the capacity tier extant is the way to go. The documentation confirms this will re-point all existing jobs to use the new scale-out repository when they next run and anything older than X days (whatever we set in the capacity tier option) will be automatically offloaded to the capacity tier.
The questions I have are:
- Is this the most practical method to free up space on our existing repositories and move our older monthly backups to the cloud for retention? Is there another way we should be considering?
- At what point does the copy/offload task run during this process? Is it at the point of creating the new scale-out repository if we specify capacity tier at the time of creation?
- How resilient is the off-load/copy process? We have probably 15-20TB to offload on a slow link (100Mbps) so it will take many weeks. It is a dedicated circuit which will be used only for this purpose but we can’t guarantee that it wont be interrupted at some point during the process.
- How careful should we be regarding running these off-load/copy tasks whilst our normal production backups are running. We can set the copy window options to not allow copying during our backup windows - is this required/recommended?
- How long will we have to wait before we start to reclaim space? Will veeam mark a backup file for deletion as soon as it has copied it to the capacity tier or will we need to wait until the entire initial off-load has completed.
Any input greatly appreciated!
Thanks,