VTL or not VTL?

[HHansen]

Hi,

I just wanted to hear if anyone here has any good experience with VTL that can run on the backup server (WS2016) and store on an external storage device (In my case a synolog rack station which is offsite)

My scenario is that we run (besides all other veeam stuff) SQL backups directly to disk on the backupserver as encrypted SQL backup files, and then i wanted to copy these backups to offsite storage with retention and control this through Veeam B&R.

I've been doing this up until now by running tape jobs on a daily/weekly/monthly/yearly basis to tapes in my MSL4048, but now i want to do the daily/weekly/monthly to external storage instead to get rid of the time consuming tape rotation operations.

So i've been looking into VTL since i cannot see any other functions in Veeam B&R which will solve this for me, does anyone have good experience with VTL or know if there are any other approach that would solve it in a similar matter?

Any suggestions is welcome

Thanks.

[nielsengelen]

As you are stepping away from Tape (or want to) how about the use of Backup Copy Jobs? In which you can make an additional copy of your backups (with different retention) to disks (anywhere you want).

The design would be:
- primay job on the local server
- backup copy job to the other server or storage

[HHansen]

Thanks for you reply, much appreciated!

So you suggest to do a backup job containing the SQL backup files (created with SQL) which is stored on the backup server and then do a backup copy job to the offsite location?

This will result in read/write on the same storage system since SQL created backups is already there, dont know what it would say about this approach for performance impact, and also storing the same data twice on the same location.

I would be really cool if the normal backup jobs had the option to set retention as the backup copy jobs did, this would save me a lot of headache

[nielsengelen]

Transfering single files (SQL files here) over can not be done via Backup Copy Jobs. This would be a file copy job but there is no GFS retention on these.

It would be more on the idea of creating a VM backup on the VBR server and then send it over (as I understand you store the SQL backups there?). Or how about leveraging a small VM with some storage where you store the encrypted SQL backups (as I don't know the size I'm suggesting this), backup this one with VBR and then copy it offsite?

[HHansen]

Its around 4TB of compressed SQL backup, it would take way longer for Veeam to handle this, i've already been down this road.

But i've taken you advice into account and im currently running a test where i do a backup with veeam of the single folders and then do a backup copy of this job to my offsite location.

I will let you know how it goes, thanks again

[HHansen]

Still testing this, first part works, and backup copy works, but when 2nd run of backup copy wants to run, the file from the first run disappears and it fails... Very strange

[HHansen]

Now its finally running as it should, it was a sync job on the destination storage which removed the file during the night.

So now its running backup of the SQL backup files to a veeam backup job which is copied offsite with backup copy.

Its been running without errors the last 3 days and the whole process (without the SQL backup jobs) takes around 5-6 hours per day, which is acceptable.

Thanks for your input