How do you deal with human changes that have huge impact?

[geertmoenaarts]

I use Veeam B&R to backup our windows nas, the NAS has 3 partitions 32TB,32TB and 44TB.

It runs as 3 seperate jobs in the form of volume level backups over each of these partitions.

With copyjobs running to transfer a copy also off-site.

Anyway, it's been working nicely, but lately some departments decided they want to restructure the way they organise their files/folders.

Usually 1 department represents about 1/10th of one of the volume level backups. In this case let's say 3TB for 1 department. But if they suddenly rename a few high level folders or copy over files from one folder to another trying to make their idea of a new structure work, my backup will start to fill up with 3TB of files and folders that have simply been moved around.

I decided to use volume level backups because I read that they were faster then file level backup, which is why I decided against doing a file level backup per departement, but departments wanting to restructure their files is going to give me issues in the long run I think.

Now in this case I can probably handle the extra size it will take up in the backup due to it still being one of the smaller departments and they were smart enough to ask me in advance, whereas another department did not ask and they just started reorganising everything and I only noticed because I usually have around 100-150 GB of backup transfer a day and that day i suddenly had 1.2TB.

I know I cannot pick and choose what to delete from the backup without destroying the the chain most likely, deleting the entire backup of 1 volume and restarting for 1/10th that changed seems a bit overkill as well, even though I can most likely re-backup 30TB in about a day due to 10gbit between both servers.

I know about old file retention deletion, but the explanation on the Veeam site mostly seems to talk about VM's that would be forgotten if they weren't in the backup job anymore, how this would work with files/folders from a NAS isn't exactly clear.

So my basic question, how do you deal with staff reorganising NAS folders and mitigate the impact this will have on increasing backup size.

[Dima P.]

Hello geertmoenaarts,

I feel your pain, but, unfortunately, I don't have a good answer here: people change stuff and that affects the size of the backup (yes, we have CBT which catches changed blocks only, but in have of bulk delete/move that wont help much). I'd say you can use a deduplication repository to deal with the same data at the target side or use one of Veeam One's reports to track the changes within the original machines (for instance VM growth report like this. Cheers!

P.S. If you want to roll back the unwanted changes you can always perform a bare metal restore to the valid restore point