Alternative to error prone USB Backup

[xeonjackson]

Hello,

We are having issues with our Veeam B&R but have come to the conclusion that the issue is with VMware and USB Passthrough.

Currently we are using External USB 3.0 drives to accomplish these backups.
These USB drives are then transported off-site using a third-party service on a weekly basis.

The backups were working relatively well on our Server 2008 VM but with a move to a Server 2016 VM the backups are failing with numerous disk paging errors. The physical server on which the Veeam VM is hosted has not changed.

We have tried swapping out the USB drives with 6 different manufacturer's disks and each time a backup runs the backup will fail with disk paging errors and sometimes ejecting the USB disk entirely.

According to an Expert over at Expert's Exchange ESXi and USB Passthrough are known to cause the issues we are seeing.
https://www.experts-exchange.com/questi ... iling.html

I've been reading on the Veeam forums that NAS devices aren't recommended by Veeam.
veeam-backup-replication-f2/recommendat ... 21304.html

I don't know of another low cost portable solution other than a NAS that would work for our situation. We do not have the money to spend on an expensive solution.

Can anyone recommend a NAS or another device that could solve our off-site backup issues?

[Mike Resseler]

Hi Xeonjackson,

Welcome to the community forums!

For your issue. I wouldn't give up immediately on your removable media (although I am not an expert on USB passthrough). However, this error is not a typical VMware one and comes back in Windows for a lot of reasons

* Any change you have AV scanning that device while taking backups (this can cause disconnect/connect which is not good while writing the backups )
* You can get this message when you have removed the drive improperly also (and it will give you the error after putting it back in for some reason I don't know)

Have you checked the USB compatibility list from VMware? https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/micro ... Id=1021345

And last but not least, any change you have a physical proxy in the environment? Then you could attach the devices to that one and make that proxy also a repository server

Just some thoughts

[xeonjackson]

Mike,

Thank you for the input.
I am going to try to move the USB repositories to the physical proxy we have that also has USB 3.0 built into the Motherboard.
Hopefully that will put an end to these constant disk failures.

I'll let you know how it works out.

[ssjgogeta]

Hi Mike,

USB backups for large data sets are not really robust as support for USB 3.0 on servers is severely lacking (as it is more of a consumer type technology). In my opinion, tape is still the best option for maintaining offsite backups reliably.

A SAS attached 8-bay LTO-6 autoloader would not cost the earth and would provide robust and dependable offsite backups.

Cheers,

Dave.

[xeonjackson]

Mike,

We were successful with the move to the physical backup repository box.
We haven't had a single disk error.

Ssjgogeta,

I will investigate the possibility of a tape backup.
It may be what we need for our future endeavors.

Thanks.

[Mike Resseler]

Thanks @XeanJackson for the confirmation. I kind of expected that the pass-through would be the issue and Dave confirmed it (Thanks by the way!)

I also agree with Dave on the tape! Forget about the "tape is dead" stories. For many cases it is still a great solution. It just depends on your requirements

Cheers
Mike