Switching from Agent driven to VBR driven physical backups

[pkelly_sts]

I've been using Veeam for VMs since version 5 or 6 7 have loved it. Since all the covid changes I've moved out of enterprise (decent servers/budgets/storage etc.) into small biz support and have a new client that's small-medium but currently all physical with VERY flaky current backups (ShadowCraft)

We've proposed a Veeam Agent solution, as a lead-in to getting them virtualised, partly on the promise that their Veeam licenses won't be wasted going forward. I've played with standalone agents which have been fine but this is my first venture into VBR-integrated agents and it's rather more alien to me than I was expecting!

We have one very old crappy server, which desperately needs replacing, but as we've taken over support (shocking state the site was in from the previous "IT") we want to ensure we have good/reliable backups of this (and all) servers before we go making any significant changes/improvements.

I was hoping that we could initially deploy the agent locally, pointed toward an SMB share, which we could then effectively "convert" to a repository with centrally managed backups via VBR, ideally by mapping a new central backup job to the individual backups, but it looks like the endpoint0driven backups create some funky folder names in the backup repository (serve_username) which looks like it'll rule it out.

My issue is, I'm sending these to a Synology NAS (which is performing just fine & at full network speed) & our plan was to use synology replication to replicate the data to an offsite Synology (identical, over a 100mb link) so I'm trying desperately to avoid having to redo full backups.

This one crappy server has been really problematic in that I initially created a single job backing up 5 (physical) servers, but then this one server failed only100gb in (with VSS errors) which then meant I was stuck doing anything further with it while the original job was running, so, I decided to separate this server into a standalone endpoint-focused job (send to VBR repo) which I was hoping to merge later (it's around 1.3Tb server)

So, whilst I'm getting used to this new agent world, what's the best way to merge/map backups to existing files if possible?

(just to add insult to injury this problematic server is an SBS2011 box!! I just want solid backups of it before we can persuade them to migrate away from it)

Thanks!

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Paul
- You cannot continue existing Standalone Agent's backup chain with VBR job - upon switching from Standalone to Managed mode job\policy will start a new backup chain without ability to "seed" or "map" with the existing chain. Backups created with VBR Job\Policy(Managed Mode) can be moved\seeded\mapped just fine.
- SBS2011 shall be fine to backup, as long as it patched to the latest - Veeam Agent for Windows supports Windows Server 2008R2 SP1(core or SBS2011). Make sure prerequisites are met and Veeam Agent will do perfect backups for it!
/Cheers!