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randomnut
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Backing up and Restoring to/from tape

Post by randomnut »

Just got a couple of (probably very easy!) questions regarding backing up and restoring from tape, did try using the search for these but didn't manage to find answer to these questions in particular-

1) When backing up is it just the .vbk file per job that needs to be backed up? None of the .vrb files?
2) When restoring from tape, I assume it's as simple as using the Import Backup option, selecting the .vbk file and then selecting which VM you want to restore?
3) Is File-level restore still possible if the backup is restored from tape? Or is it just whole VM's that can be restored?

Also unrelated to tape backups or restores, but another question-

4) How can I remove a single VM's full backup, from a backup job which has multiple backups of VM's? ...I'm testing out the software at the moment, and as a test I backed up a test VM, and then restored it with a different name so that there was then the original and the new one I restored, and then deleted the original VM that I had. But the backup it did for the old VM (which is now deleted, and is a full backup) seems to be stuck in the list of backups and I can't find any option to delete it? Only to delete the entire backup from disk which has other VM's in the backup as well. Is this possible?

Thanks
Gostev
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Re: Backing up and Restoring to/from tape

Post by Gostev »

1. Correct, VBK is full recovery file with latest VM state captured, you do not need anything else to recover.
2. Correct, exactly as you say.
3. Correct, guest file recoveries still possible.
4. In the current version, you remove the required VM from the list of backed up VMs in the backup job settings, and initiate Full Backup. In the upcoming release, the VM will go away automatically, without requiring full backup.

Thanks!
randomnut
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Re: Backing up and Restoring to/from tape

Post by randomnut »

Thanks for your help + the quick reply! One more question-

So as the full .vbk file needs to be backed up, i assume it's a good backup strategy to seperate VM's between several jobs where possible to make restores easier...Can backups jobs be queued in any way? As i've read that it's best not to have more than 2 jobs running at a time due to the CPU usage etc, and would like to avoid having multiple jobs all running at hour or so intervals over a weekend to avoid them clashing and causing problems.

Thanks
Gostev
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Re: Backing up and Restoring to/from tape

Post by Gostev »

Correct, you may want to split VMs in a separate jobs to make the produced backup files reasonably sized to better accomodate tape backup.

Good backup strategy is to group VMs made from the same template (or running the same OS) in the single job. Due to dedupe, you will get very small backup files even though there are multiple VMs in the backup job. For example, 12 virtual machines (10GB each, made from the same template, 500MB of unique data in each) would produce about 20GB backup file (for total VM size of 120GB, which is 80% reduction).

Basically, Veeam is unique in a way that we implement what we call "SmartDedupe" (dedupe on job level, versus global dedupe). This lets you leverage deduplication capabilities without sacrificing tape backup compatibility (global dedupe is obviously not compatible with tape backups due to huge single deduped blocks store). With dedupe per job, you get great flexibility. You can as well have a single job and thus essentially get "global" dedupe, but the produced backup file will be very large, which is bad for tape backups (you would have to spend hours to pull the huge file from multiple tapes when you need to extract a single VM or guest file). Of course, the same issues apply to backups to removable storage, to remote site over WAN, or to cloud - not just tape backups.

Sure, jobs can be easily daisy chained, unfortunately it looks like forum's search is disabled at this time due to high board load, so try searching for "daisy chain" in a few hours, and you will see the topic explaining how to do this.

Thanks!
randomnut
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Re: Backing up and Restoring to/from tape

Post by randomnut »

Found the topic and got it working a treat, thanks for your help and quick replies :)
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