Best Practice (BP) for backing up remote machines

[c.schulzejn]

I've been thinking about that topic for a long time. With more and more computers leaving the Office and going to Homeoffice that topic moves from a more theoretically thing to really demand.

I know the options to stop bacupk while on VPN and to locally cache the backup while the backup repository is not available.


What about computers, which connect to the main site via VPN? I don't have any experience with WAN Accel yet, but AFAIK it requires a server on both sides. The employees working at home mostly have far less then 50MBit/s Upload and no Server at their site.

The only solution I came up with, is to lower frequency to only happen once after work hours. Are there any other option which could help?

Am I reading this correctly, that the Agent did transfer 10,9GB?
http://imgur.com/a/jhSf78i

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Christoph,
- WAN Accelerators are meant to optimize Backup Copy and VM Replication processes, and not agent-based direct backup.
- "After work hours" + "at home" = I can only guess that people will just turn laptops off?
- Easiest way to reduce backup traffic for home users is to change backup type from System State to File-Level and set to "Personal Files" only. That will backup only most critical locations(like C:\Users\Egor\Documents) instead of backing up entire system.
- Your screenshot says "Veeam did read 10,9GB fresh(or changed) data from disk C:". Compression will be applied afterwards and transferred data will be less.
/Cheers!

[c.schulzejn]

Thx for the fast answer Egor!

Yes, these ppl all turn their computers just off. I remember talking about that behavior an the forum in the past. VAW is (was?) not able to hook into the shutdown process and create a backup first, then shutdown. Did that change? Another solution might be a script and tell all employees to shutdown their computers by executing that script.

I definitely want to stay with volume level backups. We and our customers do not have enterprise size where all machines are the same and in case of an error just get replaced with a new machine and an image. They are all individual machines.

Where can I see the actual transferred data?

[Egor Yakovlev]

Well, you have 2 options with VAW Policy settings that might help:
- ask people to leave laptops online after work hours and set job schedule to start 1 hour after. In job settings you can set "After backup" action to "Shutdown machine" so people will find laptops off right after backup is completed.
- set start time to after work hours and enable "If computer is powered off at this time" to "Backup once powered on".

Actual transferred data is under [Transferred:] part of statistics. I hope you are using Managed Agents by Veeam Backup and Replication server instead of managing each standalone agent separately? In Standalone agent actual data sent will be under "Restore Point size".
/Thanks!

[c.schulzejn]

I will consider to use the option with 1 hour after work.

The agents are managed by VBR
only 900MB get transferred.

All workstations at the main office are in a single policy. Now some of them did move off-site. Can I use there backup-chain in a new policy, especially to avoid an initial full backup?

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Christoph,
New policy cannot be mapped to an old backup chain, however you can tune existing policy destination - and if it still be VBR Repository type, than mapping to existing chain is possible using this process.
/Cheers!