How to backup 2TB of Veeam Backup File

[sidavid]

Hi,
I use Veeam backup to backup VMs, I would say 2TB of VMs. Those backups are stored in a Windows 2003. Once the Veeam backup is completed, we use Symantec to backup the Veeam files on Tape and everyday I have a carrier that takes the Tapes in a save place. We use LTO3 but my veeam backup files become bigger and bigger and the LTO3 backup solution take more time to complete.
I want to change the backup solution, how did you do guys, you use another backup solution than the tape backup or do I need to change for LTO5.
Thanks for you sharing
DS

[foggy]

Hello! Have you considered to split your jobs into smaller ones and/or use forward incremental mode which is recommended for disk-to-disk-to-tape backups? Thanks.

[dhep]

How do you split a big job into smaller ones? DO you mean only selecting some SCSI nodes on one job and then the remaining on another? This is messy in my opinion and wouldn't you end up with 2 lots of VMX files for this host?

I know it's old school, but I like the way that Symantec Live State Recovery splits each Drive into a separate backup file - this makes restores quicker too.. Wish Veeam would do this, rather than have a 2TB VBK file.

[Vitaliy S.]

To split big job into smaller ones, just use different jobs to backup all VMs. For example you can group all Tier 1 VMs into 1 job, another categorization criteria might be host or datastore location.

[dellock6]

Since you are also thinking about changing the backup solution, have you considered backup to disk and than wan replication of the backup storage. There are several solutions that also do compression and deduplication, and the effective price per GB once is deduplicated is really near to tape, with the advantages of having disk backups (reliability of disks over tapes, and restore speed for example).

Luca.

[farrukhndm]

Hi,

I am requireing same thing as i am backing up my zimbra email server which is 200GB and i want to place Weekley backup to Google Drive.Google drive maximum size supported is 10 GB .

Please help me how to split 200GB .vmb in 10GBx20 .

[foggy]

It is not actually the same thing as you are talking about splitting a single VM backup file into several smaller ones which can be done using third-party tools only and is not actually recommended/supported by Veeam.

[Burnout]

It is not actually the same thing as you are talking about splitting a single VM backup file into several smaller ones which can be done using third-party tools only and is not actually recommended/supported by Veeam.

Hi, any news for this splitting mode to be implement in Veeam Backup ?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Anthony,

There are no changes since the last reply from Alexander. Can you please elaborate why do you need this capability?

Thank you!

[Burnout]

hi, i ve a concrete case sinc 2 weeks,
i've a veeam server which reboot randomly, and i can't copy on an external disk the backup of a NAS which take 695 GB before the veeam server reboot/crash

so if the vbk was splitted, i could since a long time


the external disk is to copy on another site the initial backup for the replication/backup over the WAN

[Vitaliy S.]

What version of Veeam B&R are you using? If you need to sync your backups with offsite location over the WAN link, I would suggest using backup copy jobs with WAN accelerators enabled. In this case even if your backup server reboots/WAN link goes down, the job will resume from the place it was aborted.

[Burnout]

i've test this, but with 1 Mb link ... to dangerous to not have the initial backup out of the primary location

so i use ftp on the veeam server to have the resume mode to continue the copy on the external hard disk, i hope tomorrow it will be finished

[Vitaliy S.]

Ok, keep us updated on how it goes.

[antspants77]

In answer to the original question of Symantec Backup Exec taking longer and longer.
Firstly, if possible use Veeam 7 and inbuilt tape support.
If you want to retain Backup Exec and it's on the same server, you may have issues with Veeam 7 competing for the tape drive. Also, Symantec recommend you use their drivers and Veeam would use the manufacturers drivers. Either way, they both can't use a tape drive on the same server.

If you are using Veeam on one server and a repository on another server, like we used to do back in the Veeam 6.x days, then configure Veeam backups for reverse incrementals and then configure Backup Exec, only to backup the VBK files. That way you're only backing up the full Veeam backup files and not the x number of days of incrementals as well. We were backing up 10TBs of VBKs this way on a LTO5 tape drive until the brilliant tape drive support made this redundant.

One other thing, one of the reasons that companies still hang onto Backup Exec as well as Veeam, is because Veeam didn't used to support file backup on physical servers. You still might need it if you had Exchange or SQL etc on physical server, but in that case, it's probably something you should do soon.Haven't tried file backups yet, but just a thought.

[smurteira]

We have the same need at our company. We also use Veeam to backup only the Hyper-V environment. V-Ranger to backup VMWare and Symantec for everything else. I know, a bit weird but Veeam came to the table because V-Ranger did not backup Hyper-V at the time. We backup Hyper-V to disk and Symantec backs up to tape. So with that said, I've been fighting to keep Veeam for Hyper-V for a long time and we are now doing DR planning. The fact that we would have to restore a 1TB file from tape is now becoming an issue and I may lose Veeam for my Hyper-V environment because of this. I agree that Veeam should offer an option to breakup the backups into a per VM backup file. I don't want to do single VM backups because that means that every time I add or remove a backup, I'll have to create or delete a new policy, and I'll have to time the backups and it just becomes a mess. So, I'm just chiming in to also suggest you guys offer that option in a future release.

[foggy]

Thanks for the reasonable feedback, Sergio. Much appreciated.

[Delo123]

We have the same need at our company. We also use Veeam to backup only the Hyper-V environment. V-Ranger to backup VMWare and Symantec for everything else. I know, a bit weird but Veeam came to the table because V-Ranger did not backup Hyper-V at the time. We backup Hyper-V to disk and Symantec backs up to tape. So with that said, I've been fighting to keep Veeam for Hyper-V for a long time and we are now doing DR planning. The fact that we would have to restore a 1TB file from tape is now becoming an issue and I may lose Veeam for my Hyper-V environment because of this. I agree that Veeam should offer an option to breakup the backups into a per VM backup file. I don't want to do single VM backups because that means that every time I add or remove a backup, I'll have to create or delete a new policy, and I'll have to time the backups and it just becomes a mess. So, I'm just chiming in to also suggest you guys offer that option in a future release.

You could create a Backup Copy Job, just selecting the VM you want to archive to pull it out of the main backup files. after writing it to tape you could discard it...

[smurteira]

Thanks Guido, that just adds too much complexity to the backup operation. What I would like is for Veeam to integrate that as part of the software and let us choose how we want to store the backup.