An “air-gapped” secondary copy of a backup on removable media (RDX and alike)

Recommended settings:

Attach removable media device and create a repository on it. Go to repository properties – repository – advanced and enable the option “this repository is backed up by rotated drives”. It is recommended to attach device to a Windows machine and assign it a drive letter. It is possible to attach the device to a Linux machine or present it as a network share to Veeam, however in this case retention policy will work in limited mode.

For BCJ set the copy interval to run regularly (for example, once a day). GFS points cannot be stored on rotated drive, so this option will be grayed out. The drive should be swapped at the end of copy interval when all restore points for the day have already been copied and statistic shows “waiting for next copy interval”. Retention should be set depending if repository is a Windows drive with letter or a Linux drive/network share:

• Windows machine with a drive letter assigned: in this case Veeam will be able to account all the points stored on offline drives. Retention setting in this case specifies the number of restore points on each drive (so retention set to 7 means that retention policy will not be applied until number of restore points on the drive reaches 7). First time a drive is connected Veeam will create a full point. However, if a drive already has a backup chain created by this job Veeam will create an increment to this chain. Thus every drive will contain a separate forever forward incremental chain. Since incremental runs take less time drives can be swapped regularly (once a day for example)

Avoid creating Active fulls on BCJ that uses rotated drives with drive letter assigned. Creating an Active full switches the mode from forever forward incremental to forward incremental. For rotated drives, this also means number of restore points to keep will switch from "for each drive" to "across all drives". This may lead to deletion of large number of restore points (E.g. retention set to 30 points, each drive keep 30 points. If Active full is created, 30 points from attached drive will be deleted, because job will only require 30 points total)

• Linux machine or network share: in this case Veeam removes information about created restore points once the drive is swapped. The points remain on the disk, but will not be deleted by retention and eventually a disk may get filled up. You can set Veeam to wipe the content of backups folder when the drive is connected by adding DWORD ForceDeleteBackupFiles (please see https://www.veeam.com/kb1154 for details). Veeam will also trigger a full backup each time a drive is swapped, so in this case it may be more rational to swap more rarely (once a week for example)

Should you need to perform a restore from points located on an offline drive, connect this drive and perform Import procedure as described here https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/importing\_backups.html?ver=95