Suggestions for tape copy of storage appliance replicated backups

[raronson@dga.org]

We have 2 sites, a primary in Los Angeles and a satellite in New York. The sites are connected via SD-Wan, about 200 megabits each direction. We recently updated to veeam B&R 10.

Each site has an Exagird backup appliances storing local backups that perform deduplication. We backup incrementally on weekdays and run either full backup or synthetic backups on weekends. The backups from the satellite site are replicated in deduplicated form from NY to LA. There's roughly 24 days of retention for the NY backups. In LA we run tape copies once a week for all the full backups and ship them off site.

My problem is Veeam sees replicated backups as files, not actual backups. I have to use a tape copy job of the entire repository instead of just copying the most resent backups to tape. The satellite backups should be 2 tb. With retention I copy 7 tb to tape every week. I'd like to find a way to only copy the most recent files. If I can't do that can I script something to remove all but the most recent files from the replicated backup repository?

I can provide graphics if this posting doesn't make sense.

Thanks

[Dima P.]

Hello Rob,

Just to clarify: at both sites you run independent instances of Veeam B&R, right?

[soncscy]

Hey Rob,

I think I get Dima's train of thought here -- Veeam associates its backup to tape with actual jobs, not just files. From what I remember with client testing, even if you share a repo between two servers and source the tape from repository, Veeam won't take it unless these are part of an active job. So if there are two servers and the remote one has the tape infrastructure, then it might not be aware of your replication depending on how you do it.

How are you doing the backup "replication"? Is this some native Exagrid thing? (Sorry, I just haven't dealt with exagrids much recently)

If you're using Veeam Backup Copies, then this is simple -- just add the second site as a tape server to the first site, and manage the tape backups that way -- it will keep everything remote as long as you choose the backup copy/remote repository.

If you're using some Exagrid replication, you're going to have to create dummy jobs and map them to the backups (which is just not tenable, imo).

[raronson@dga.org]

Yes, we're replicating using Exagrid's native technology. Veeam isn't aware of it. That's why it just looks to Veem like a copy of files from disk to tape, not a Veeam backup to tape. I was wondering if I could schedule an import of the backups that have been replicated as a way to make Veeam aware of the replication.

[soncscy]

Sounds complex You'd have to use powershell for this and just thinking about it, it seems non-trivial. Looking on the powershell forums there are some unsupported ways, but do you want to go that route really?

Would just a built-in Backup Copy with Immediate Copy be better? Should be the same amount of data, and you'd move very little over the WAN if you use WAN accelerators.

[raronson@dga.org]

I'll look at that.