Backup a Folder in a VM

[tocallaghan]

Hi,

At the risk of asking a question that's been asked before, I wanted to know if it's possible to only backup a specific folder using the Veeam api w/o making a backup of the entire VM first.

I feel that I might have over looked something

[dellock6]

Hi,
regardless the use of API or the Veeam interface, VBR is an image-based backup solution, so it always works at the VM level, or to better say at the VMDK level. The best you can do is to placed special folders into a separated vmdk and backup only that disk, but for example the vmx configuration file will always be saved.
Out of curiosity, is there a reason for this request? Veeam Filer level recovery is able to restore single files anyway, even if the backup is about the entire VM...

[tocallaghan]

Thank you for the reply.

Yes, the purpose of this request is because we bill on storage used. So, if a user wanted to just backup up, say '/var/www/*', they'd only be billed for only that backup, not the entire snapshot/archive. You are 100% right though, VB&R is an image based solution, so I might need to re-think this a little.

Luca, thank you so much for the response. That was helpful.

[dellock6]

You're welcome.
Honestly, if I understood correctly you work as a service provider for what you said, still I'd prefer to have a complete VM backup in order to restore it. Then I can maybe configure it to only keep few restore points to lower the storage consumption, but the backup of a single folder does not protect me for additional issues like kernel problems, filesystem corruptions, and so on.
Instead, with a single image backup I can then offer an entire range of restore possibilties. In V8 now also file searches thanks to the new linux indexing capabilities.