Additional caching?

[cary@compcond.com]

Like others I tried using a Synology NAS as a backup target without success.

My first solution was to put a 10TB spinning HDD into my desktop and use that for Veeam to back up to. Several days of monumental noise later I gave up and replaced that with a 2TB SSD. The backup took a few hours (currently about 400GB) and life was good. I don't see any noticeable performance hit to my desktop (i7-7700 w/16GB RAM).

It is critically important to encrypt both the OS drive and the drive being used as all your clients' email data is visible should the backup machine get stolen or accessed in an authorized manner. Finally... a use for BitLocker.

It would also be great if some RAM could be allocated as a write cache to avoid thrashing the HDD. I don't think anyone wants to waste money on SSDs for email backup.

[Mike Resseler]

Hi Cary

First: Welcome to the forums!

If you are using VBO then the bottleneck won't be IO but the network. (Well, the connection to O365). This connection is throttled and with your desktop the HDD should not be an issue? Can you explain a bit more about the monumental noise?

[cary@compcond.com]

Backing up 68 mailboxes took several days. My download speed is 300Mb and VBO wasn't using much.

VBO was using 11GB of RAM. The hard drive was getting thrashed (Windows reported close to 100% disk utilization) for days. Total backup size is 661GB.

I'm guessing VBO is comparing the server to the local cache on a granular level but I have to believe that this can be done in RAM rather than torturing the drive.

[Mike Resseler]

That actually doesn't look normal to me.

Can you log a support case? Also, 68 mailboxes (unless they are each 100 GB) shouldn't need several days... I think some modifications to the threads could be done to make this better

Mike
Please log the support case ID here and the outcome of the result with the support engineers

[cary@compcond.com]

To do so will require me to remove the SSD and put the spinning drive back. Is there a way I can switch back to the SSD without starting the backup over?

Also, is there a way to upgrade or replace the computer doing the backups without starting from scratch? If I'm going to keep a long history for compliance I need a way to migrate the backups to newer hardware at some point.

Thx

[Mike Resseler]

Cary,

You can indeed "migrate" VBO to another server and continue without starting from scratch. The only thing you will have "lost" is the password for your account that connects to O365. This is because we are storing that password securely and when you migrate to another computer, you loose one of the keys to decrypt that password. Not a real big deal as you just need to run through the wizard of adding an organization again to add that password in again, and use the new key to encrypt it.

We are also working on a potential migration system so data can be moved between repositories. At this moment I cannot say yet when it will arrive, and we are still studying on different scenario's, but we are intending to give you more options

cheers
Mike