Unmanaged Veeam Agent backups for Offline server

[rals]

Hi R&D Team,

We have a customer inquiring about a solution for backing up a completely offline physical server. I am considering the feasibility of using Veeam Agent (Unmanaged) to perform a backup to an external hard drive. Subsequently, the hard drive could be transferred to the original Veeam repository connected to the VBR server for import. Could you please confirm if this approach is viable?

BR
Rasmus

[Mildur]

Hi Rasmus,

I have moved your topic to the "Veeam Agent for Windows Forum."

You can take backup chains created by one of our Veeam Agents and transfer the backup files to a Veeam Backup & Replication repository. If you copy the entire chain along with the metadata file (*.vbm), a rescan of your repository will automatically import the backups. Alternatively, you can also perform a manual import (either vbm or vbk).

I believe your idea works for the use case of a "one-time backup."
However, I’m not certain how this would be manageable for regular backups, such as daily backups. I would recommend using a forward incremental chain with weekly full backups. This way, your customer can manually copy the newest chain to the backup repository. However, even with this approach, you would need to replace the metadata file as well.
And In case you use "forever forward incremental backups" with the agent, you need to replace the entire chain on the backup server with the new backup chain.
This process involves a significant amount of manual work directly on the backup repository. And also introduces security concerns, especially since no one should be connected directly with RDP to the backup repository server for security purposes.

Please test the transfer/import process with your customer to make sure everything works as expected.

Best regards,
Fabian

[edh]

Hi Rasmus,

I can confirm that your approach works. Some customers do that like a on-call "Tape Service" but just disk. Depend of each backup i will recomend SSD disk , actually there're up 32TB/64TB SAS4 in 2.5" with 5000MB/s, that will help to fast offload the data to the main repository "Gapped" and get a a good performance.

Offline cluster, not network connected still exist in R&D companies and yes they need this kind of services.

Regards

[rals]

Thank you for your response,
Very helpful for this particular case,