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perjonsson1960
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Configure secondary destinations

Post by perjonsson1960 »

Folks,

I have an existing backup job that backs up several VMware virtual machines every evening. It has a retention cycle of 14 days, and it creates Reverse Incremental backups, which means that it always has a full backup at the front of the backup chain, and 13 rollbacks behind it.

If I decide to link this backup job to a backup copy job, using the "Configure secondary destinations for this job" feature, what happens the first time the copy job runs? Does it read the completed full backup for each server, in order to create a viable backup copy for each server? And if so, what happens after the next backup has created a new full backup file for each server? We can for example say that the retention cycle in the copy job is 7 days.

Sincerely,
Per Jonsson
foggy
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Re: Configure secondary destinations

Post by foggy » 1 person likes this post

Hi Per, on its initial run, backup copy job will create a restore point corresponding to the latest VM state available in source repository, it will be its full run for each of the VMs. Subsequently, it will copy only changes creating a single restore point (again, corresponding to the latest VM state) during each copy interval, regardless of whether the source backup job last run was full or incremental and how many runs the source job had in-between.
perjonsson1960
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Re: Configure secondary destinations

Post by perjonsson1960 »

Thank you!

A related question; When I create a backup copy job, and include two or more servers in the job, then Veeam seems to incorporate all the servers into a single backup file for each restore point. Does this mean that if I link my large backup job that backs up our 205 VMs, to a backup copy job, then all 205 machines will end up in a single VBK (or VIB) file? The full backups (VBK files) for all 205 machines take up approx. 15 TB. Is it a problem if the VBK file gets this large? Is it better to create multiple copy jobs and include maybe 25 or 50 VMs or so, in each job?

We are currently backing up our two physical Exchange servers with B&R, and they contain approx. 2.5 TB of data each, and the backup copy VBK file is thus approx. 5 TB in size, and that doesn't seem to be a problem. It takes the copy job approx. 12 minutes to create a new synthetic full restore point in the backup copy chain, and that, quite frankly, isn't very much... ;-)

Sincerely,
Per Jonsson
foggy
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Re: Configure secondary destinations

Post by foggy »

Take a look at the per-VM backup chains setting, should address your concerns.
perjonsson1960
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Re: Configure secondary destinations

Post by perjonsson1960 »

Okay, I understand... It is the repository setting that decides whether it creates per-VM backup files. And since we are using a scale-out repository for all our backup jobs, where "per-VM" is the default, we have gotten "per-VM" for all our backups, which is good. But we are putting the backup copies on a repository that is NOT included in the scale-out, and I see that the "Create per-VM files" setting is not enabled on that repository, and that explains why our two Exchange servers are put into the same backup files...

What happens with the backup copies of the two Exchange servers if I change the repository setting to "per-VM files"? The original backups of the Exchange servers are of course already separate, since they are backed up in separate backup jobs.
foggy
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Re: Configure secondary destinations

Post by foggy »

For the setting to take effect, you need to perform a full sync. Starting this new full backup, each VM will be stored separately.
perjonsson1960
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Re: Configure secondary destinations

Post by perjonsson1960 »

Thank you very much! :)

PJ
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