Exchange 2010 and Veeam Backup Sizes

[keithgrey]

Hello All,

If this has been answered I cannot seem to find it myself on the forums or the blogs.

We currently are using Veeam 6.5 Backup and Replication to backup our Exchange 2010 servers. One server is the Client Access Hub Transport server and the other is the Mailbox Server.

The Client Access Hub Transport server is 60GB used size and the Mailbox server is 360GB in size (40GB OS and 320GB EDB and log files).

My backup is setup as such:

Under Storage:

Veeam backs up the entire Datastore (both servers and all their disks are on the same datastore in VMware)

Rentention Policy is set to keep 21 restore points.

Under Advanced on the Storage settings:

Under Backup Tab:

It is set to Incremental with Enable synthetic fulls (forever-incremental) on Sundays and Active Full Backup on Sundays.

I am not sure if this is redundant and if i can turn one of these off or not.

Under Storage Tab:

Deduplication is set to Enable inline data deduplication
Compression is set to Optimal
Storage optimizations set for Local Target (iSCSI disk on Veeam backup server)

Under vSphere Tab:

Changed Block tracking both Use changed block tracking data and Enable CBT for all protected VMs automatically are checked off.

Under Guest Processing:

Enable application-aware image processing is checked

Under Schedule:
Runs every day at 10pm

My issue is that for 21 restore points I am using 1.68TB of space to back this up.

This doesn't seem right to myself or my colleges.

Any suggestions or is this expected size?

Thank you,

Keith

[sbbots]

Full backups count as restore points and you do 2 full backups every weekend. So after 21 restore points there are probably 6 to 8 full backups sitting in your repository. So if each full is ~250GB times 6 copies, badaboom badabing you are up to 1.5TB already before incrementals.

[tsightler]

If you're backing up to a disk target you might want to consider using reverse incremental. Then you need only space for 1 full backup and 20 restore points, which would save a LOT of space, although backup performance would likely be slower, based on your target storage.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Keith,

It is set to Incremental with Enable synthetic fulls (forever-incremental) on Sundays and Active Full Backup on Sundays.

I am not sure if this is redundant and if i can turn one of these off or not.

Yes, this is redundant. If I were you I would go with Synthetic Full option in order not to stress your production VM with additional snapshot creation/deletion operation during full backup job run.

Matt is correct, can you please take a look at your backup file info and tell us how many full backups (vbk files) you already have on the disk?

Thank you!

[keithgrey]

Okay I will try the Synthetic Full.

Also i have 4 .vbk files all of which are 7 days apart. They are 334GB each.

So about 20% dedup/compression.

Will see if the synthetic full and turning off full backup will help.

[foggy]

This will not reduce the overal space required for backups as only one of the scheduled fulls (active) is being performed on Sunday. With forward incremental mode with weekly fulls and retention policy set to 21, you will always have 3 or 4 fulls at different moments in time, depending on the weekday. Please see this topic for detailed explanation.

[yizhar]

Hi.

Please consider the following retention policy using VBR 6.5:

Daily backup for short term =
reverse (or forward) incremental.
keep 10 restore points.

Weekly backup for long term =
reverse incremental.
keep last 6 restore points (6 weeks instead of 3, but using less disk space).
if possible - store weekly backup on different repository.

After upgrading to V7, you will be able to use "backup copy job" as alternative to weekly backup.

Yizhar