Best practice for setting up groups.

[mschlott]

I'm setitng up my Veeam groups and I'm starting to wonder if there is a better way. My goal is to have my full backups be sent to disk over the weekend and have them copied to tape in time to send off site monday morning. The way I am trying to accompish that is set up multiple groups, 4 to 8 on each Veeam server with each group running a synthetic full on Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday. The problem I'm running into is the synthetic fulls can take so long to run that they overlap the next days or are still running when my tape backup of the Veeam server runs. If this is the best way to do it, I can work with that and do some tuning and balancing amoung groups and servers. My question is this, do synthetic fulls run longer with more data/VMs in it than 2 seperate groups running synthetic full backups on different days? If no one knows the answer to this, then I'll just give it a shot and see how it works out. If I group 50 servers into a group with a backup file size of about a Terabyte, I'm suspecting that I'm going to run into performance issues creating synthetic fulls and rolling up my previous fulls into rollback files.

mike

[mschlott]

Summary. Should I have one huge group, or multiple smaller groups?

[Gostev]

The fewer VMs you have in backup job, the less data there is to process during synthetic full, so of course the time it takes to create synthetic full is directly affected by the number of VMs in the job, and also how active on disk write I/O they are.

[mschlott]

I assumed that was true, but what I'm looking for is this. If I have 2 groups and each one takes 6 hours to run a synthetic full, could I expect a new group that contains all the same servers as the other 2 groups combined to take 12 hours for a synthetic full, or would it take significantly longer?

[Gostev]

Combined job will take less than 12 hours (more data to work with => better dedupe => less data block to process comparing to 2 separate jobs). Definitely no reason for it to take longer.