Advice Needed for Large Offsite Backup Over Low-Bandwidth Link

[tbtfw]

Hi all, I need some help and advice for setting up a large offsite backup plan given bandwidth constraints.

We have a branch office with about 40TB of data that needs a daily backup to headquarter(not backup copy). However, the network link between the sites is only a 100Mbps line.

Doing a full initial seed backup directly over this link would take over 18 days based on the math (40TB / 100Mbps = ~37 days). But daily incremental backups of changed data around 300GB would be fine over this slow line.

I'm looking for advice on the best way to do the initial full backup

Some options I'm considering:

Shipping an external hard drive with the initial 40TB backup to the headquarter instead of sending all the data over the network. Is this possible using Veeam?

What would be your recommended approaches for this situation? Are there any best practices for this scenario?

[MarkBoothmaa]

I'd 100% recommend seeding using an external source.

If possible I'd use a NAS and mount it as an iSCSI disk otherwise copy speeds are likely to be poor.

[tbtfw]

Here's the process I've planned:

Backup to Local NAS: We perform initial full backup to a NAS located at our branch office.

Ship the NAS to Headquarters: We're planning to physically ship this NAS to our headquarters.

Transfer Backup Files: Once the NAS is at the headquarters, I intend to copy the .vbk (full backup) and .vbm (metadata) files to the headquarters' backup repository. I plan to do this using something like Windows Explorer.

Rescan Repository: After transferring the files, I'll select the headquarters' repository in Veeam and perform a "rescan" so that it will able to recognizes the new data location.

Update Backup Job Repository: Finally, I'll update the repository settings in our branch office's backup job to point to the new location at headquarters.

My questions are:

Are these steps sufficient to ensure that the backup chain will not be broken, and that incremental backups will proceed smoothly after the NAS relocation?

Is there anything specific I should be aware of when copying the .vbk and .vbm files, or any best practices to ensure data integrity during this process?

After updating the backup job repository to the new location, will Veeam recognize the existing backup chain, or are there additional steps needed?

Any insights, suggestions, or steps that I might be missing would be greatly appreciated.

[tyler.jurgens]

The article listed here is for backup copy jobs, but it will work the same for a backup job.
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... nk&ver=120


> Are these steps sufficient to ensure that the backup chain will not be broken, and that incremental backups will proceed smoothly after the NAS relocation?
Yes, incremental backups will proceed as normal.

> Is there anything specific I should be aware of when copying the .vbk and .vbm files, or any best practices to ensure data integrity during this process?
You can take a sha256sum of each file to be sure the files are the same after copying.

> After updating the backup job repository to the new location, will Veeam recognize the existing backup chain, or are there additional steps needed?
You need to map the backup job back to the imported backups you copied over that show up after the rescan.

[tbtfw]

Thank you so much guys!

[dabrigo]

If you mount the NAS as a repository in the HQ site, you can use the Move Backup feature in v12 to keep ReFS/XFS deduplication, otherwise the full size of backup files will be required on the HQ repository.