Host-based backup of VMware vSphere VMs.
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neilpotter
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Two backups or an off site copy?

Post by neilpotter »

Veeam 9.5 with VmWare 5.5
For a while now I have been running two independent backups with Veeam. One in site and one off site. Main reason being in case there was an error or corruption in the backup then the 2nd version would have less chance of the same error.
Currently its a reverse incremental setup for both.
However as my system grows, the backups take longer, especially the off site backup over a 100Mb Line via VPN.

So would swapping my secondary off site backup for an "off site copy" script be any better / faster than existing?

From what I understand, it should be as I guess the VM's only need to be processed and indexed once but wanted to see what people thought.

Also, do I just build an Off Site Copy script with no VM's listed, and then add that script into the primary backup script, and I guess that forces it to backup rather than using the time set on the actual off site copy script?

Thanks
dellock6
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Re: Two backups or an off site copy?

Post by dellock6 » 1 person likes this post

Neil,
backup copy jobs were designed exactly for this scenario, so that you only touch your production data once but you can then have multiple backup copies in different locations. It's also the reason why BCJ support wan acceleration and primary backups do not, since the former were designed with remote locations in mind. Also, please note that backup copy is not just a raw file level copy of the backup files, but there's a read-check-write activity in it, which means data is checked when from backup is copied into the backup copy. Any corruption happening in the backup file will be catched by backup copy. In regards to corruption in the guest os instead, those would be copied in both backups anyway, but even your solution would not help. What helps here is versioning (as long as you can revert back in time before the corruption happened you are safe) and surebackup.

Luca
Luca Dell'Oca
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neilpotter
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Re: Two backups or an off site copy?

Post by neilpotter »

Awesome. So i've started a test backup to the offsite repo and at 6Tb it's going to take a while so I'll probably seed a backup locally first.

On a semi related note, the other VM's that we have are set to run a Full backup once a month on the on-site repo.
If we now change the backing up of these VMs' to an offsite copy, what happens when we do a full backup each month? Do the full backups also get copied to the off site repo, which may take a while, or is there some magic involved?

Thanks
veremin
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Re: Two backups or an off site copy?

Post by veremin »

Do the full backups also get copied to the off site repo, which may take a while, or is there some magic involved?
Full backups won't be archived by backup copy job as is, instead only changed blocks will be copied. You can call it magic, if you like. :)
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