Backup Grouping / Folder

[Titanmike]

Would be nice if you could create folder in order to group backup jobs.

It would make it easier to group by time / name / source etc. etc.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Michael,

Thank you for your feedback! Could you please tell me how many backup jobs do you have now? Do you use single Veeam Backup server?

Thanks!

[Titanmike]

A single backup server and I just started to implement it but once we have added all VMs to Veeam we're talking about 100+ VMs.

[Alexey D.]

How many jobs do you plan to have?

Actually grouping many similar VMs to single job will give you an advantage in compression/deduplication.

[Titanmike]

How many jobs do you plan to have?

Actually grouping many similar VMs to single job will give you an advantage in compression/deduplication.

We don't group jobs, we have one job per VM. We simply don't have virtual machines which are that similar to justify it. We also have to run jobs at different times etc. Trying to group them could be a nightmare

[Gostev]

Well, virtual machines do not have to be similar at all. We dedupe on block level, and thus we will dedupe similar data even across completely dissimilar overall VMs. As you can imagine, every VM will have at least some data (on block level) similar. Honestly, it is hard to imagine that you have managed to build 100 of VMs to be absolutely different. Because at a minimum, this would require each and every VM to have its own operating system

But even if this was the case, let's imagine say you have a job of 10 absolutely different VMs. Then, you happen to add the same 500MB ISO file on all of them. With separate jobs, you next incremental backup size will be 5GB (collectively across 10 jobs). With single job, your incremental backup size will be 500MB.

As for your feature request, we do have some plans to improve job management down the road (things like chaining/grouping/etc). However, creating 1 job per VM is definitely not expected or recommend way to deploy our product, and we are unlikely to add any enhancements to user experience for this specific scenario. I can see how this approach may be possible to use when you only have limited amount of VMs, but it just does not scale beyond hundred of VMs (neither for manageability, nor for backup storage space because of missing dedupe). So, we are just not building our product around this backup management approach, at least for now.