Question regarding File Share Backup Jobs

[jhrysio]

Hello,

I’m looking for more information on the new File Share Backup Jobs introduced with v10.

Currently we are using TSM to back up our file server shares. A common problem is the .PST files, we repeatedly do a full backup of the same file if the “last modified” timestamp is all that changed. We end up with many copies because Outlook updates the last modified timestamp whenever it opens a .PST file.

Basically when a user opens Outlook and they have an Archive attached it changes the “last modified” timestamp which results into another Full Backup of that .PST, even if they didn’t change anything in the archive.

How would a Veeam File Share Job handle this?
Would Veeam do a Full backup of the PST or just an incremental?

Thanks!
-JH

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hello,
File level backup tracks is file has been modified, and if so, backs that file up. So there will be no difference with Veeam.
As a potential alternative, if a file server hosting said share is Windows\Linux server, a block-level backup using Veeam Agents might solve it, as it backs up actually changed blocks of data on a volume.
/Thanks!

[Adam.Bergh]

Egor is correct here. Outlook has actually changed something in the .PST, even if only a few bytes. The .PST is changed, and Veeam's NAS backup works at the file level and will back that file up again. Block based backup is a much better approach to backing up these files. Can you tell us what kind of storage or server the .PST files are sitting on? Are they on a Windows or Linux file server or a pure NAS device like ONTAP or Isilon? Thanks!

-Adam

[jhrysio]

Thank you both very much for the feedback.

Servers are virtual machines with Windows Server 2016.
Storage is IBM v7000.

-JH