Move from backup on premise to backup from Azure, including moving history

[evast]

Good afternoon all,

I hope someone can help us with this.
At the moment we use Veeam Backup for Office 365 on a Windows 2012 Server which is installed on premise. Veeam has been upgraded from older versions to version 4 now and because we have been upgrading it a couple of times, there is a lot of history in the repository which is on local disks on the Server (approx 30TB).
We now want to create a new Server in Azure and we want to start backing up to Azure Blob storage from there as Veeam Backup for Office 365 now supports that as well.
We however want to migrate our historical backups as well to the Cloud, but question is, what is the best approach? In an old article (version 1 and 2), it stated that if you move to a different Server, both OS versions must match, which means we either must first upgrade our local Server to 2016 or 2019 and install a 2016 or 2019 Server in Azure, or we must find a way to create a Windows Server 2012 Datacenter (no R2) in Azure to match it to the on premise Server.
And what about the data in the repository. Can we simply copy it somehow to the new Azure Blob storage, or should we first connect the Azure Blob storage to the old on prem Server, make sure everything is pushed to the Cloud from the on prem Server and as soon as that is done, connect the Azure Blob to the new Azure Server and continue from there?

[nielsengelen]

In terms of upgrading Windows, do you backup the VBO server with VAW by any chance? I would first try this on a copy since going from 2012 to 2019 is quite a heavy jump and as we use JetDB, there may be internal changes that may impact. If this works, you could use Veeam Backup & Replication and do a Direct Restore to Azure.

However, since you are moving the Office 365 data to Azure Blob you will first have to attach the object storage to your existing server and push the data over. The flow is described in this KB.

The next step would be to attach the Azure Blob to a VBO server in Azure. You should be able to deploy a 2019 image and install the software. From there you can attach the Azure Blob storage and you have the data. As we don't leverage JetDB for Object Storage, there should be no need for the same OS on this level. The problem here is that you will need to re-create the jobs manually as this is seen as a fresh install (while preserving older backup data).