Implementing regular backup to disk combined with monthly backup to tape
I'm kind of at my wits end with trying to configure this product (Acronis Cyber Backup 12.5 SCS Hardened Edition). Hope someone in this community knows how the best approach for working with tapes in the following scenario.
Our infrastructure includes physical machines, VMware vSphere, and a TrueNAS share. So we have four jobs which backup to a share on the backup server:
- An "ESXi configuration" job, backing up the VMware metadata
- An "Entire machine" job, backing up all of the physical machines (via native agents) and the VMware VMs (via appliances)
- A "Disks/volumes" job, where we backup only certain disks of a couple of physical machines (again via native agents)
- A "Files/folders" job, where we backup the TrueNAS share (which is mounted on the backup server)
For all of these jobs we use the "Full, Differential, Incremental (Custom scheme)" schedule whereby we take a full backup on 1st of each month, differential every week, and incremental every weekday. With our 50TB of backup storage, we can store a few months of backups. This works ok.
We also want to have one full backup for all of the above go to tape which will be archived long term. What's the ideal way to do it?
Things I have looked at:
- We're currently running a "Files/folders" backup of the backup folder to tape. This works poorly as it's obviously backing up every backup on the server not just the last full backup.
- A monthly backup replication plan, replicating "only the last backup" to the tape pool sounds like a good option. But will it actually consolidate a usable Full backup for the last backup or will it take a useless incremental or differential backup if that was the last one that happened? Also, the Options don't provide a way for a Tape Set to be specified, so it would appear that the backup tapes will be unlabelled in this scenario, which is pretty useless.
- Adding a 2nd Location for all of the original jobs. But then I only want it to happen for Full backups, not every incremental or differential.
Has anyone figured out a good configuration for this scenario?

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Hello Forky2,
To clarify on this:
- But will it actually consolidate a usable Full backup for the last backup or will it take a useless incremental or differential backup if that was the last one that happened?
Replication is like a re-backup. Not sure about they type of backup that would be created at the target location (i.e. if an incremental backup is also an incremental at the target), but it's certain that the same restore point that was in the "last backup" will also be recoverable from the target location.
In my experience configuring 2 locations within the backup plan is only suitable for the simplest cases. More complex requirements would need a replication plan to fine tune what happens when. It could also be desirable to transfer the network and computing load from the agent that is backup up to another one dedicated to handling replications.
-- Peter
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