PC backup with Veeam Agent to Azure

[jcofin13]

I have a pc that has been getting backed up locally via the stand alone agent. ITs now a requirement that the machine be also backed up offsite.
Object storage from Azure blob storage will be used.

I am unclear when you would set for the azure blob storage settings on the azure side. When do you select Hot or Cool? Is once per day considered hot and once per week considered cool......or once per month etc. Once the main seed gets uploaded (~700gb) i would expect any change data to be quite small.

Also i am curious about names or the folder structure in azure.
Is it such were you create a container called "WorkstationBackups" and inside that create a folder with the PCs name. Will Veeam create the "veeam" folder and all subfolders under that when the first backup runs or as you setup the agent job to connect to that container and folder?

[david.domask]

Hi jcofin13,

I've moved your topic to our Object Storage as Backup Target forum as seems the questions are more about the structure of our backups on Object Storage / using Object Storage repositories.

>When do you select Hot or Cool?

The access tier is set when adding the Object Storage Repository

> Also i am curious about names or the folder structure in azure.

Object Storage repositories use a unique structure to optimize storage usage and reduce API calls to the Object Storage target. Creating the repository will create the necessary base structure, and additional folders (actually prefixes) will be added underneath those to store the metadata and the actual backup data.

You do not need to engage directly with the data on the object storage repository and must not. It is not simply storing VBKs / VIBs like you're maybe expecting, it uses a different structure.

[jcofin13]

Thanks for the information.

I guess im still confused about the hot/cool tier options.

When you setup the storage in azure you have to select one. Not sure which to select.
The link provided above is for veeam 13 vbr. I assume agent will have the same settings?
I have a machine that id like to backup once per day to this stoarage. The cold tier is data that isnt accessed much....but if backups run every day then woudlnt it be accessed every day....thus cost more?

The next area says the following:

Important

"If you enable this option and plan to use this object storage as a performance or capacity tier, do not target to this repository any jobs that constantly send backup data to this storage: scheduled regular backup and backup copy jobs that run without GFS, jobs with transactions logs enabled, jobs created by Veeam Plug-Ins for Enterprise Applications. Otherwise, it will result in higher costs."

What is "this" option? Is it referring to the cool option or both hot/cold options?

If it's only in reference to the cold option, then it must be recommended that ongoing backups using the agent should use the hot option? Is that correct?

Id suspect the data to be backed up at kept for at least 30 days. Likely more. Id suspect maybe 10gb of change per day on the data.

I know when you setup the repo or the storage blob in azure the container must be set to cold, cool or hot. I am after that setting as well> it is not clear which one to pick there as you set this up for ongoing backups of this one machine.

[david.domask]

Hi jcofin13,

Which to choose is largely a matter of your preference depending on your use case. Microsoft's guidance is listed there and will be up to you to decide on based on your restore needs.

> What is "this" option? Is it referring to the cool option or both hot/cold options?

It's referring to cool tier.

Unfortunately can't comment much more as just knowing that you're sending a backup isn't enough information -- as noted in the User Guide, if you're not using GFS or if the job has transaction log backup enabled, then Hot tier is recommended.

[jcofin13]

Thanks. Yeah i suspect the machine in question would be looking to send its backups there nightly. I don't think gfs would be needed for it in this case. I guess hot tier would make the most sense in this case as the storage tier would be "touched" or accessed every day the backup runs which i would suspect then wouldn't be considered cool or cold as it has to refer to the older backups to determine the incremental for the day. Hot has the lowest access cost per the link shared. Also, an occasional full would result in the same behavior as would the pruning of the old backups as the retention falls off. I guess i don't see where cool or cold would ever make sense other than if you wanted to copy a chunk of data to it and then never touch it again ever. Maybe a 1 time backup for some reason or maybe a yearly. I know veeam writes a ton of little encrypted files to the object storage and again from what i have seen it ....its really slick at tracking all those. That said, its a ton of "access" to the storage to place all those little files and then clean them up or roll them up when that time comes. I assume the agent works in this same way. I guess what i am getting at is access will almost always need to be hot on a nightly backup to object storage because of frequency and the way the files are written from what im thinking.

I do believe in this case the backup will likely just backup nightly on a 30 day retention; Incremental always except the occasional synthetic full or actual full on demand.