Large Backup File Seed using VAW

[rsanders]

I am here at Point A. I am flying across the country next week to help move one of our clients remote location offices, which we will call Point B. They have a gigantic physical server at Point B that we plan on virtualizing and hosting at Point A and then providing remote access to users at Point B. Attempts to just push this backup through their WAN connection have been...pretty terrible. I have done many P2V conversions successfully using VAW to Hyper-V Instant Recovery, so I want to use it for this one. While I am at Point B I am going to take a VAW backup of the large physical server onto an external USB drive and bring it back to Point A with me. I have found that if I configure the backup to "Local Storage" and then try to change that later it always triggers a full backup. However, I ran a test where I created a shared location on the USB drive and then configured the backup to a "Shared Folder" location and then moved the drive to another location, recreated with the same share name, changed the hostname in the shared folder location in the backup config, and then started another backup - it worked incrementally right away instead of triggering a full. Is this working because it is a 1:1 backup type to a shared folder and I am tricking it into essentially working as a local seed drive? Point A and Point B are on a VPN with an MPLS, so am I crazy to think that I can use this USB share folder trick and then bring it back with me and then perform incrementals over the VPN until it is time to virtualize? I also ran a test where I set the destination as a local VBR repository, however this job did not run as quick or efficiently.

Sorry for rambling. Thanks for any insights or ideas you can provide.

[andrie]

Have you tried https://www.veeam.com/kb2321 ?