Veeam General Question (Backup Copy + Backups)

[Schnuecker]

Hello,

i have serval question after testing around (B&R Community Edition):

1. We are kinda fighting with storage problems (and sadly before my time, the equipment was already bought) so we made Backup Volume Job for our Fileserver. Now we set it on restore point to 1 and said it should do each month at Saturday a active full backup. If we have now backup copy job to external drive which we want to secure, i said this drive is swappable and set the restore point to 35 (28 +7). Is that the best way?

If i am correct i should be able to switch the external drive at end of month and with the new one it should start from restorepoint 1 with new full back up?

2. If we would say the external drive has 4 TB space and i start my jobs of 2 TB in middle/end of the month, i would have 2 Full backups jobs of 2x2TB (start+new month), will the backup copy store only one of this? Or do i need bigger drive then?

3. What is best way to determine the IDE/SCISI Disk if i doing VM Backup? If i kinda select all Disk the calculation stays at 80 GB (Size of system drive).

4. I understand that Synthetic Full Backup takes the files from another backup, so how secure is this?

5. In many forums i readed that the active full backup could be bigger as synthetic, is that true?

[Schnuecker]

6. Application Aware i really only need if i want to backup like directly to SQL or Exchange Server ?

7. Does Guest OS Indexing makes the file recovery explorer faster to load or what is the benefit?

[DGrinev]

so we made Backup Volume Job for our Fileserver. Now we set it on restore point to 1 and said it should do each month at Saturday a active full backup.

1. If I got it right, you are protecting the fileserver by Agent volume backup job. The Retention value can't be set as 1 the minimum value is 2. Can you clarify?

If i am correct i should be able to switch the external drive at end of month and with the new one it should start from restorepoint 1 with new full back up?

That's correct. After a swap of the external drive, the backup copy job should create a new full backup.

2. The backup copy job doesn't copy but creates a separate backup chain.

3. It doesn't seem like normal behavior, and it should show the total size of the consumed space on the selected disks.

4. Yes, it synthesizes a full backup from the data you already have on the backup repository.
It's recommended to perform Health Check once a month when you're using a periodic synthetic fulls.

5. It's not true, both are about the same size.

6. An Application-Aware Processing should be enabled in most cases since it guarantees you the consistency of application data inside of VM.

7. It allows you to search for VM guest OS files inside VM backups. You can find additional details in the User Guide here.

Thanks!

[Schnuecker]

First of all much thanks, even some of this question are easy, i searched long for confirmation.

1. If I got it right, you are protecting the fileserver by Agent volume backup job. The Retention value can't be set as 1 the minimum value is 2. Can you clarify?

We have set it to "Managed by Server" and type "Server", because we had problems doing the full backup (We got Sync/Uploud Disk Errors with reading the next block / Application is shuttin down) at different transferred size. And yes we set it 1 Restore point, it says it would be recommended but actually we dont have the space right now of two full backups at the time.

3. It doesn't seem like normal behavior, and it should show the total size of the consumed space on the selected disks.

That is really strange, does i need to give somehow permission inside the VM maybe?

6. An Application-Aware Processing should be enabled in most cases since it guarantees you the consistency of application data inside of VM.

Of VM and Volume i could understand it, but even if i only backup normal files like zips ?

Another question would be, is it good to do Full Backups of the already files like zips which are technically full backups? Lets say my programming storing 3 backups inside his folders and i would do only monthly full backup and the backup chain breaks in the middle of the month, could i stell restore the last day? Technically it would not need the full backup (I dont want to backup each day three zip files).

After all i see veeam as good product but if your testing and switching/ deleting jobs / computers, you can break/get erros from so many things, like in my backup copy it says

Unable to determine the source backup file chain to use: multiple backups with the same instance ID exist in the specified sources for this Backup Copy job.

I hope i can fix it with the next full backup / switch of my external drive. What i did so far i deleted the points of the job inside the backup copy job (because i know these ones were failures)

[DGrinev]

1. You said the primary job creates 1 restore point per month, thus your backup copy job will create 1 restore point each month for 35 months (almost 3 years) to exceed the retention. Is that is what you need?

2. No additional permissions required. It's hard to troubleshoot without logs review you can contact the support and let them take a closer look.

...but even if I only backup normal files like zips?

3. For the file-level backup job without any transaction logs or DB files in the source, you can turn it off.

You should not be able to use the most recent restore point for restore if the middle of the backup chain became corrupted.

4. I wouldn't recommend deleting restore points from the backup chain manually even if you are sure they were corrupted somehow.
Please check the following limitation for backup copy jobs processing Veeam Agent backups, that should help you to fix the said error.

Thanks!