Host-based backup of VMware vSphere VMs.
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james.gale
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Feature Request: Tool to perform transforms on backup files

Post by james.gale »

I have a fairly simple request for the ability to manually re-process existing backup files.

A typical use case would be where I have full .vbk files (compressed and deduped by Veeam), that I need to copy on to deduplicated storage, and would like to be able to expand the file in the process.
Likeways, it would also be useful to have the ability to compress and dedupe (with Veeam) .vbk backup files if I need to move data off a deduplicating appliance on to regular block storage.

A simple command line tool would suffice. I'm sure others would find this useful as well.
foggy
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Re: Feature Request: Tool to perform transforms on backup fi

Post by foggy »

James, if we are talking about compression, this is something you can achieve now with the help of backup copy job. Setting the original full as a source for the copy job and configuring required compression settings, you can get a newly created full backup after its first run. Veeam deduplication doesn't affect dedupe storages, so it is typically recommended not to disable it even if the target is dedupe appliance.
james.gale
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Re: Feature Request: Tool to perform transforms on backup fi

Post by james.gale »

Hi Foggy,

I don't think that this really does what I'm after. This would only work for recent backups, it would not let me process legacy .vbk files.
If I import a .vbk in to Veeam, whilst it appears under Disk (imported), I cannot use it as a source for Backup Copy jobs.

I've got two specific instances where I could use the proposed tool to transform/reprocess .vbk files:

1. With primary backups (~31 days) using fast disk as a local repository, we have found that running backup copies to a dedupe appliance is not feasible, due to the high IO requirements of the transform operations. Simple powershell-scripted copies of the completed .vbk files ingest quickly on dudupe storage and are a good option for us, but we then have to decide whether we a) Enable compression on the primary backup to reduce footprint on the fast disk (at the expense of dedupe appliance footprint), or b) disable compression on the primary backup so that we gain efficiency on the dedupe appliance. As both types of storage are fairly costly, I'd rather have the best of both.

1. Legacy point-in-time vbk files, compressed and stored on dedupe storage in flat files. These are not associated with a current Veeam backup or backup copy job, in fact they're not in the Veeam database at all - they are imported ad-hoc if/when a restore is required. I would like to be able to uncompress these files so we can gain efficiency on the dedupe appliance.
veremin
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Re: Feature Request: Tool to perform transforms on backup fi

Post by veremin »

With version 9 you'll be able to achieve your goal, as we're adding active full functionality for backup copy jobs to address similar requests. Thanks.
foggy
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Re: Feature Request: Tool to perform transforms on backup fi

Post by foggy »

james.gale wrote:This would only work for recent backups, it would not let me process legacy .vbk files.
If I import a .vbk in to Veeam, whilst it appears under Disk (imported), I cannot use it as a source for Backup Copy jobs.
Actually you can, however, using a sort of creative approach.
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