Advice on Remote VM backups

[kevindv10]

Hello.

I've been running Veeam B&R 6 for a while now, located at our head end. For remote DR backups, I was first thinking I would just copy all the Veeam backups to our DR site, and in that way would have a backup of our backups.

Now I'm thinking it would be sufficient to just move the Veeam server (it's physical) to the DR site, reconfigure whatever is necessary for the new IP address (it would be on a different subnet but routing is in place), and let the Veeam server backup as it's been doing for months.

Is this a standard practice? If not, what are people doing for remote backups?

Thanks for any input.

[dellock6]

Hi Kevin, your idea could work but you have to place another proxy in the source site, while the Veeam server will act as a target proxy for the backup. Otherwise you will experience bad performances in remote backup.
Another idea can be to replicate the data of the Veeam server using rsync or other tools to DR, so you will keep two copies of the backups (while in your idea is always one copy); what if you have Veeam repository only in DR and you loose it, or if you have to do a restore in the primary site? Will the restore speed be good for your needs?.

[kevindv10]

Thanks Luca.

We had talked about Rsync to a redundant, offsite repository but I was concerned that there might be issues with registering those redundant backups within Veeam should we need to use them. If we were forced to use the redundant repository, would Veeam simply 'be aware' of that repository if we brought it back to the main site?

[Gostev]

No issues with that.

[foggy]

If we were forced to use the redundant repository, would Veeam simply 'be aware' of that repository if we brought it back to the main site?

You always can create a new repository pointing to the required location and rescan it in Veeam B&R. After that all the backups will be imported and ready for restore.

Also, please note that Veeam B&R comes with a standalone utility (extract.exe) that allows to restore VMs from any VBK file created by Veeam B&R, even without the product installed.

[kevindv10]

Hey guys, I'm back on task!

I was starting to build a linux machine to use for remote backups, and I was going to use Rsync (cwrsyncserver) on our Windows Veeam backup server to pull the backup files to the linux machine. However, since Veeam renames each backup file to indicate the date of the backup, it means that even if I seed this linux server with the existing files, it's going to have to pull a new file every day for every VM backup. That's too much data to cross. Any other suggestions? I had a quick look at the backup jobs in Veeam to see if I could change this renaming behavior but it doesn't look like it. I'm using Reverse Incremental for most of my VM's.

Thanks again.

[foggy]

Kevin, take a look at this thread.

[kevindv10]

Thanks. After I posted I found a whole bunch of threads regarding this. Still learning to help myself!