I need a solution
We now have our BE backups up and running, saving to a dedicated NAS (connected via iSCSI). This is all working fine. However, once a month I'd like to duplicate a full backup to an external drive connected via USB. These drives should rotate. Every year, the first backup of the year will be pulled out of rotation and not overwritten.
A few questions on this:
- These backups obviously require BE to restore. Let's say 5 years down the road, we need to pull something off of one of the old disks. Maybe we're not running BE anymore, or maybe the product has changed sufficiently it won't restore from these backups. Are there any recommended ways to deal with this? I was thinking of including an OVF template export of the BE server on each disk, so worst came to worst we could spin up the VM on an older version of ESXi. Any better ideas?
- I'd want only the one full backup to be on each disk, just to keep things clean. (Since these aren't our primary backup media, we don't need lots of multiple copies and whatnot.) Should I just have a scheduled task to clean the drive - except for the abovementioned OVF or whatever - when it's physically swapped? Or something similar?
- Will I run into issues with expiries on these backups? So if I put a disk from 3 months ago in, will it recognize it's old and try to expire the backup set? Can I set a different expiration period (or none) for the duplicate backup than the main backup has?
- Do I need to make these external disks into a storage pool the same way I would if they were my primary backup location? Or does it matter, since I'm just putting a single standalone copy on and not trying to maintain dependancies or anything?
- Any concepts I'm just completely missing about this? :-)
Thank you!
