Setting up an incremental-only backup job

[tonycraft45]

Hello,

In my company, we are looking to replace the data backup system of the workstations.

Currently, scripts copy every day the data that has been modified or added on each machine to a nas. These are incremental backups, and the data is never deleted in order to benefit from several years of history.

I don't know how to configure a Veeam Agent for Windows job to work in a similar way. I should know that I configure my jobs from the Veeam Backup & Replication console.

What settings do you think I should use when creating the Veeam Agent job to get closer to how our current backup system works?

Best regards.

[Mildur]

Hi Tony

Veeam Agent has also the possibility to create forward incremental forever backups. File or Image based. I don't recommend to do the file based approach. Image based backups have a better backup performance and depending on the file size and changes it could take much more backup storage to store all incremental restore points. Veeam Agent will also allow you to restore an entire machine if it fails to start. So it's better to have an entire computer backup instead of a few files.

Normally this steps are needed:
1) Create a Protection Group and add your machines
2) Create a Backup Job (managed by Backup Server) or Policy (Managed by Agent)
How they are configured depends on your environment.

Are you still using the NAS as a backup target? How will it be connected to the veeam agent? Do you connect it to the VBR Server with iSCSI and store the backups on the iSCSI LUN? Or do you want to use the NAS as an SMB Share? Do you have created a protection group?

[tonycraft45]

Hello and thank you for your answer!

I have already created a protection group containing my machines. I have created a backup task dedicated to the windows machines of this protection group.

The inventory went well and the Veeam agents were automatically deployed on the workstations. The target of the job is a repository of the Veeam Backup & Replication server of my company.

I am very interested in the "forward incremental forever backups" method but the problem is that the necessary options to activate it are not available in the parameters of the backup job I created. Here is the tutorial I followed:

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110

Have a nice day !

[Mildur]

Hi Tony

You don't need to activate it, you need to disable synthetic and active full backups.
In my Lab, if I create a backup policy for workstations (Managed by Agent), I can disable synthetic and active full to create a forever incremental backup chain.

I also recommend to you to have a look at File Backup Jobs. If you need to store multiple file versions for years, that could be a better option for your goal. But the files should be stored at a single place. If they are distributed over dozens of machines, it will be complicated to manage this sort of job.

[tonycraft45]

Thank you !

So I modified my job and disabled synthetic and active full backups. Before I run the job on my test machines, I have a question:

How many days should I fill in for the "Keep backups for" option? My goal is to keep all data backed up incrementally.

Thanks a lot for your help!

[Mildur]

Hi Tony

Depends on how much storage you have. But there is no indefinitely with Veeam Backup Jobs. The maximum I can set in the GUI is 730 days.

Another issue you will get with forever forward incremental and indefinitely restore points is that you will have a very long backup chain.
Delete a single vib-file from the backup storage (vib = incremental file) and you must create a new Full Backup. Additionally all incremental backups after the deleted vib file cannot be used for restoring any data. Same goes for storage corruption. If one vib cannot be read from the storage, all backups after the corrupted one are also useless.

Can you tell me, what the primary goal is? Are you looking for some sort or archiving software to archive each file for legal purposes?

[tonycraft45]

Hi,

Yes, I suspected that the fact of working only in incremental mode would pose this kind of reliability concern.

The main objective of my project is to backup the data in the user folders of all the PCs in my company.

Currently our backup solution (a simple batch script) will copy to a network location all new or modified documents in the user folders of our PCs. This allows us to retrieve documents that were deleted long ago by our users. In fact, we are not really interested in having multiple versions of the same document. In summary, we want to make Veeam work in a way that resembles the way our current backup solution works.

Sincerely.

[Mildur]

Hi Tony

I think, you should try to optimize it on production site first. Meaning, checking for other solutions to handle your companies files. Why not using SharePoint as a centralized place for your documentation and then use Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 to backup the files on the SharePoint? A centralized server or SharePoint would give you more control about the documents.

If your documents would be on a centralized file server (or NAS), File Backup Jobs would be a good solution for your goal.
If you still want to use Veeam Agent to backups, then you can configure a short term retention for a year with weekly synthetic full backups and monthly GFS restore points as long as you need (and the storage is available). This would give you daily backups for the last year. And if you need an older backup, you will have at least monthly backups of each workstation.
Don't forget to configure a backup copy job to an offsite location, which is immutable or air gapped.