Migrating Windows Agent Job to B&R Job

[technomancer_101]

Hi all,

I was skimming through the posts to see if there was something similar to this that could help, but I haven't seen anything quite with what I'm asking, I don't think.

Right now I have Veeam B&R Enterprise Plus, and it is managing backups for all of the VMs on our network, however, there is one VM (our fileserver, WS 2012) that is being managed by a Windows Agent right now. I was hired here 3 months after the previous IT guy quit suddenly, so there is no documentation as to when or why it is setup like this. From what I've read, it's really best practice to be backing up via a backup job, which makes sense.

So my question is, is there a way to setup a backup job to replace the agent backups without having to run a full backup again? (It's a few TB big and we have a 50Mbit connection to our offsite, so that would take a while)

I know seeding jobs is possible, but I'm not sure if it's possible to use an agent backup to seed a backup job from B&R.

[HannesK]

Hello,
sorry, but it is not possible to convert an agent backup to a VM backup and then just point to it.

Best regards,
Hannes

[technomancer_101]

Darn, that's what I thought, but I thought I'd better check.

Is there any benefit to switching from an agent backup to a B&R job at this point?

[HannesK]

hmm, mainly instant VM recovery would not work if it is a VMware host (IVMR to Hyper-V is also possible with agent)

[technomancer_101]

It is running on VMware, so that might be worth my time to re-backup the whole thing as a VM Job.
Thanks

[Dima P.]

Matthew,

In theory you need to create a VM from agent backup and then perform regular VM backup. To achieve the first goal you can perform Export as virtual disk type of recovery via Veeam B&R console to convert disks from the backup to vmdk (and then mount it to the VM). Another option might be to perform Bare Metal Recovery (mount the iso to a blank VM) and then backup the resulting vm with VM backup. Hope that helps, cheers!