Indexing servers and tape

[slidek9]

Hullo,
We are having a really hard time at the moment with indexing and Veeam.
I guess 1st off; we brought Veeam when it was v4 and of course surestart was advertised without the additional hefty enterprise price tag.

Essentially we backup so many servers, there is only room for 8 or 9 restore points at any time; this means that the Veeam file index only holds information on files (for the file servers) for 8 or 9 days;
Once a week the VBK's are written to tape and off-site.

Now, if someone calls down and wants a restore of bob.doc from 2months ago but they are not sure of the date - without an index how can we know from which tape set to use to restore it?
having to restore 3TB VBK file in the hope it is the right one; then send the tapes back and recall another set from iron mountain (because bob.doc was not on that weeks set) - all because Veeam will not show an index of any media that has gone off-site. This is harder of course that there are only small windows during the day the tape drive can be accessed and the massive amount of man hours this process takes up.

So essentially; what we are left with is a system that is worse than our old TCP-to-tape system as we have no idea what files are actually on the tape once the VBK has been written to tape and taken offsite.

How can Veeam call itself a backup solution if I cannot search the to tape media index for a file that is 6 months old?
Why can't Veeams index also hold historical data for backups that have staged to tape?

Because of this we are looking to drop veeam from our company (55 CPUs) and move back to our old tape solution (hell its slower but it works with a seachable media index for the files).

Has anyone got any suggestions on how to keep the indexes around for longer?

How does your company keep the index of fileserver files that have gone offsite?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Leon,

Our Enterprise version of Veeam B&R does allow for searching files in both current and archived backups. Since you've mentioned that you bought Veeam when it was at version 4, I'm sure you remember that Veeam had offered free upgrade to Enterprise Edition to all existing customers with maintenance agreement in force.

I'm not sure whether you've taken advantage of that upgrade or not, but seems like you're running Veeam B&R Standard Edition, which can only search for guest files in backups which are currently on disk, and not in archived ones. Enterprise Edition, on the other hand, does allow for searching in archived backups. There is catalog data retention policy setting available under Configuration > Catalog Settings > Retention Period that defines how long you want to keep the guest index data for.

Thank you.

[russwatkins]

[merged]

Hi,

I've recently installed Veeam Backup and replication Enterprise V6 for my company. I backup around 40 VMs to disk and have a 30 day retension for these backups.

I need to keep monthly backups forever so will be putting my veeam backup files on to Tape once a month. I've got no issues completing this as I also backup physical servers on this server via data protector.

As we need to keep backups forever, I also need to be able to complete a file level restore on these monthly backups if required. However I don't know how Veeam handles this. I presume if I delete Veeam backups then the index gets removed from the database? If this is the case, is there a way to stop this happening? What would Veeams best practice be in this situation? Would I need to restore each backup file from tape, import back in to Veeam and then search for the files in question?


Many thanks



Russell

[russwatkins]

Thanks for the merge, and this answers my question perfectly!

What a great forum.

[russwatkins]

I've made the change today to allow my index to retain 36 months worth of archived data.

Once i have backed up my veeam files to tape, what is the best way of removing these files from the disk?

Many thanks


Russell

[foggy]

They should be automatically removed according to your backup retention policy settings.

[zak2011]

Is there any specific setting to retain this catalog information in VBR6.1? Is the guest file system indexing related to this or is it only for searching files within the guest operating system?

Thanks!

[foggy]

Yes, catalog folder stores guest OS index files used to search for and restore files within backed up VMs and the retention policy setting for it is available under Configuration > Settings > Guest File System Catalog.