How to Implement a Grandfather-Father-Son Backup Strategy

You can use a Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS) backup strategy to retain backups for tiering into capacity tier. This allows for cost savings by moving older backups from performance tier to capacity tier with a scale-out backup repository. If you'd like to confirm or use a scale-out backup repository on your Veeam Cloud Connect service, please contact the Virtual Systems Help Desk. A GFS strategy involves retaining backups from different periods: Weekly, Monthly, or Yearly. Using a simple backup policy to keep backups for a year, every backup in the chain would have to be kept that entire time which uses a large amount of your storage resources in performance tier. However, with grandfather-father-son backup, you only keep specific backups for a set time, which can use less storage on lower cost storage. Also, GFS backups are always full, containing the whole backup file (not incremental) at a specified time and kept outside the daily backup chain. Veeam synthesizes full backups using restore points on the target backup repository, reducing the load on the network and production.

Configuring a grandfather-father-son on a Backup Copy

You can configure a GFS policy on either a Veeam Backup or Veeam Backup Copy job. This article will demonstrate creating GFS policy on a Backup Copy job.

In the Veeam Backup and Replication console, expand Jobs > click on Backup Copy.
Right click on the Backup Copy job to add GFS Policy to > click Edit.

2. Select the Target tab on the Edit window.

3. Check Keep the following full backups longer for archival purposes, then click Configure.

4. Next, set the restore points you wish to keep as part of your GFS cycle.

In this example, you’d be keeping four weekly backups, eleven monthly backups, and seven yearly backups for archival purposes and keeping them outside of the daily backup chain. You can select the desired full backup you want to use for each restore point with the drop down menus. When you have the desired restore points, click OK.

Remember: If monthly or yearly full backups are scheduled on the same day as the weekly full backup, Veeam Backup & Replication will create only one archive full backup based on the weekly backup. It will also be marked as the monthly or yearly GFS backup.

In this example, the restore points would be archived for:

4 weekly full backups taken each Sunday.
11 monthly full backups taken from the first weekly full backup each month.
7 yearly full backups taken from the full monthly backup every January.

5. Once you have configured the grandfather-father-son backup chain you desire, review the policy and click Finish to apply the settings to the job.