backing up only shares, is it possiable?

[nsitguy]

Hi I just received a demo of Veeam 6.5 and I'm using Vmware esxi 4

what we traditionally do in our organization is full back ups every night but we are not doing the entire system just the critical file shares and AD info etc.

In Veeam I'm not able to see the actually file server share, it appears I can do a complete backup or I can choose to exclude 1 or more drives but I do not see the option to only back up my accounting share like in backup exec.

Am I missing something ?

I don't really need to backup my entire VMDK everynight.

thank you

[foggy]

Matt, Veeam B&R is an image-based backup solution, meaning that you can exclude entire virtual machine disks from processing but cannot exclude certain files/folders (other than the swap file that is excluded automatically) in the guest OS.

Have you considered incremental backup of the whole VM? Depending on the amount of changes the particular VM produces, incremental block-level backup of the entire VM could run faster than the full backup of the single folder inside its guest OS.

That said, there is a File Copy job available within Veeam BR that can be scheduled to copy the whole folder to the specified location making a full run each time. However, this type of job does not provide deduplication and compression of the copied data.

Thanks!

[nsitguy]

Thank you

I though that was the case but just wanted to confirm.

I will go with an incremental and a weekly full

[rbrambley]

Just to try to add some additional clarity for file shares:

Veeam cannot directly do file copy jobs from a CIFs share presented from a filer. In this scenario, there is no OS for Veeam to deploy it's service to.

The CIFs option you see when you click on add server is for using a share as a target for backups. I know sometimes it's a bit confusing that we don't separate adding sources to backup from adding targets to backup to. But from the add server wizard You can add windows and Linux systems to Veeam, auto deploy the service, and do file copy jobs for VMs or physical servers. Like Foggy mentioned, it's not jobs that dedupe or compress, and we do not do change blocks only incrementals for these type of File Copy jobs

That being said - if you permanently mount your filer share to a Linux VM or server (for example) you can add that to Veeam, successfully deploy the service, browse to the mounted filer share directory, and then do a Veeam File Copy job.