Retention Policy, Repo sizing and Offsite Backup Copy
Hi Everyone,
We are new to Veeam and having difficulty estimating storage requirements and implementing the correct strategy to meet our retention and off-site requirements.
- Typical environment is 5-10 VMs running on Hyper-V.
- Fairly large datasets of 5 TB to 10 TB mainly CAD/CAM files, photos and docs.
1. RETENTION POLICY:
We are coming over from Storagecraft where we always configured continuous incrementals. In that system the first backup is a full and every subsequent is an incremental. I suppose the Veeam equivalent is Forward Incremental Forever with the exception that Veeam needs periodic fulls recommended every 30 days!
ShadowProtect Image Manager consolidates hourlies into dailies into weeklies into monthlies. While the drawback is that you might have longer chains, the system is stingy with space.
We were generally going with the default SP retention policy which meets the needs of most customers:
- a week of hourlies (taken 9-6 during business hours Mon thru Sat)
- 15 dailies
- 3 month of weeklies
- A year of monthlies
As an example of a server configured with above retention policy we have 8TBs of data currently, image running for 2 years consuming about 17 TB of space! It seems that a similar set up with Veeam would require 10 to 20 times more space as the BP guide recommends taking a full every 30 days!
On above link they are estimating 2.4 TB of space for an 80 GB server in Example 3!!!
(2) BACKUP COPY JOBS TO VCC PARTNER
This is our main reason for coming to Veeam. Yet if we take fulls every month, we would have to copy TBs of data into the cloud every month. Even with 100 Mbps symmetrical pipe which is about the best we can get in our area for SMBs, it would take over a week.
Isn't there a way we can configure this so that we only send incrementals up and the consolidation is done by the cloud vendor. We will most likely go with iLand.
Thanks.