Disk to Disk to Tape for SMB

[Dave-Departed]

Hi All,

Bit of a n00b when it comes to Veeam and backup types/schedules, so I'm after a bit of advice, please...

We currently have 1.5TB of VM data to backup (which will rise to around 3TB once we have finished our virtualisation process), with a 16TB backup repository available to Veeam, and this is the backup regime I am imagining:

Sun-Fri = reverse incremental with 28 restore points available.
Sat = Backup Exec backs up Fri reverse incremental to tape, giving weekly FULL backup (every 4th Sat is monthly backup, every 12th monthly is yearly)

Do I need to do anything else? Also, if the Veeam backup files are already compressed by Veeam, can BackupExec compress the data further? (eventually, we will have 3 tape drives available to connect to the Veeam backup server)

Thanks in advance

Dave

[dellock6]

Hi Dave,
your design sounds good, I do not see any problems with it.
About compression, Veeam files are already highly compressed (and deduped) so I do not think Syantec can add further compression. Best is to test it with and without compression, maybe symantec compression would only waste time and you would be better to disable it.

Luca.

[kewnev]

I take it the tape is your offsite backup? If so, are you sure that one tape backup per week enough for DR? You could lose up to a week of data.

The other thing about compression, I imagine in most cases it would be the tape backup drive's hardware compression that gets used. I'm curious to know also whether turning this off increases performance.

[kjc3303]

I can confirm what Luca says from my tests symantic backup will offer no or very little extra compression due to already being compressed with veeam

Dave why not do a tape backup each day for off site backup? you do not need to backup all incremental files just the full backup (can be filtered using Backup exec). You'll only be backing up backup files so can usual be done outside you usual backup window if you are short of time.

[Dave-Departed]

Thanks for the swift responses, guys.

Yes, the tape will be an offsite backup, however, what I neglected to add is that we also plan to offload backups daily to a remote location (we have 2 possibilities, either satellite site via WAN, or physically separate building in same complex, via fiber, hopefully the latter), using Veeam or rsync. Might also eventually try out replacing the tape with a series of removable disks, as I've seen people seem to do this a lot.

All of our data should fit over 2 LTO tapes, by the look of things. Last night, Veeam compressed a 1.4TB backup into 430GB!

Thanks

Dave

[kjc3303]

No Problem Dave, sounds like a similar setup to mine.

We have
onsite daily reverse incremental to disk ( I use this as my working backup) 28day retention
Offsite daily Reverse incremental to disk (satellite site connected via 10mb Fibre) (this is my backup backup)14 day retention
Offsite Replication to above site
Daily dump to tape for extra offsite availability (this is mainly in the event of a complete disaster as the two sites are only 3 miles apart, in case the whole area is unavailable so we can go and set up somewhere else)
Monthly archive of tape to fire safe

I know the above is a bit belt and braces but imo better safe than sorry, plus the amounts of data we backup are not huge (28 day retention is around 2TB) so costs for disk space are not too much of a worry.


Kev

[Dave-Departed]

Sounds good, Kev... I agree, better to be safe than sorry!

Looks like we'll have a very similar setup, at least initially, until we can switch from tapes to removable disks.

Although I've just run into a problem, which I've raised with support - My initial backup ran fine last night (with the exception of a couple of VMs that didn't process, due to me not removing their snapshots, duh!), yet when I tried to manually run it this morning, to test what kind of speeds I'd get by doing an incremental during production hours, it got to the processing of the first VM, and failed with "Job has failed. See logs for details". Had a look in the logs, it's all greek to me, haha!

[Dave-Departed]

Ignore me, I'm an idiot! I had put a deny schedule on the job!

[J1mbo]

until we can switch from tapes to removable disks.

Do it, you won't look back. USB 3 drives, TrueCrypt or some other encryption layer, quick script - job done

[rmargeson]

any idea which would compress data more, Veeam or Tape Hardware Compression? Greatly interested in knowing the result... may end up having to test it.

Thanks,
Rob

[veremin]

The reduction ratios typically depend on the type of the data - how well it can be compressed. As to usage of particular mechanism, the best idea would be to conduct several tests, indeed. Thanks.

[rmargeson]

I agree that compression is based on the data however that doesn't indicate which would compress more data - i.e. hardware vs software. I figured Veeam would have statistics in compression... In any case that doesn't seem so - therefore I'll go ahead and do my own testing and post my results later this week.

[veremin]

If you open statistics for the backup job session, you will see there information regarding data reduction ratio (processed, read, transferred x). Thanks.