Backing up a file server?

[mcsmithSOP]

Our company is switching from BE to Veeam for our virtual environment. The original plan was to continue to use BE for the physical servers. One of them is a WS 2012 R2 file server with approximately 2.5TB of data spread across multiple volumes on different arrays.

Is it recommended to use VEB in this situation?

I've read the user manual (twice), and the only downside I can see is having a very long backup chain based on 28 day retention policy.

Having suffered catastrophic array failure on a previous file server, I want to be absolutely sure that we will be able to recover specific volume(s) in case of failure.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello,

I do not foresee any issues if it is just a file server machine. During beta program we had one customer using VEB to backup/restore his file server and he didn't experience any issues with that.

Can you please clarify what the retention policy downside is?

Thank you!

[Mike Resseler]

Hi,

To give some more detail on what Vitaliy S. said. It indeed should not be a problem. We had a customer who did more than 15 TB. The thing that took long was the merge of an old recovery point that was past the retention.

That said, a few things you can think on:

* Why not put a shorter retention of a week, use a B&R repository and then use a backup copy job on that data to another repository or tape or... for a longer retention? If you are planning on following are known 3-2-1 rule, this could help you a lot and "offload" resources from your file-server to the backup server.

Mike

[mcsmithSOP]

Can you please clarify what the retention policy downside is?

My understanding is that I would have one .vbk (full) and 27 .vib (incremental) files that would need to be restored. Maybe it's because we're still backing it up to tape and since I can't imaging having to grab a month's worth of tape for restore, I just need to wrap my head around D2D.

* Why not put a shorter retention of a week, use a B&R repository and then use a backup copy job on that data to another repository or tape or... for a longer retention? If you are planning on following are known 3-2-1 rule, this could help you a lot and "offload" resources from your file-server to the backup server.

Thanks for the idea. This would make more sense (for this server) than keeping 28 days worth of data on the B&R reepository.

[Dima P.]

Hi mcsmithSOP,

... I just need to wrap my head around D2D

14 days of backups with forever incremental backup is the default for backup to disk jobs and the most preferable retention but you can make it even shorter