Backing Up to external hard drives

[Aaron@CRi]

Hello All,
I had a question about backing up to external hard drives. My company is a consulting company and we service mostly SMB clients. We are doing a lot of ESXi Free deployments where the client only has 1-2 physical servers. These servers are ESX host and all there Windows servers are guests on the host.

We have decided to use Veeam as it fully supports ESXi Free. Our current solution is to have an admin workstation where Veeam Backup is installed and we use a series of eSATA external to backup to.

My question is, how do I set up Veeam so it can backup to multiple eSATA drives that are being rotated offsite. Is anyone using a similar set up and how are they setting up the backup jobs, as well, have they tested the restore?

Aaron

[Gostev]

Aaron, I think best would be to set all jobs to backup locally to admin workstation, and use post-job script functionality from Veeam Backup advanced job settings to copy files to external hard drive. You cannot really have external hard drive as a target location, and just swap hard drives because Veeam Backup uses synthetic backup and it requires previous full backup to be stored in target location when incremental job cycle kicks in. So you need a "static" backup target.

Thank you!

[Gostev]

Aaron, I've also PMed you a question on related topic - I would appreciate if you answer when you get time. Thank you.

[steve.lavoie]

We are in the same situtation.

So I will have to think to a "static" target too..

[Aaron@CRi]

Gostev,
Can you recommend a good script to move those backup files in the post job script.

Here is what I am trying to understand, I will use an example to explain.

Let’s use a basic setup as an example. Let’s say I have my admin workstation that Veeam Backup is installed on. It has a C: and D: drive. I set my backup job to save the backup file to “D:\Veeam Backup\VM Servers”. I have 2 external HD that will be rotated weekly offsite after copying the backup files to them.

The backup job is set to have 7 rollbacks. So by the 7th day I have 7 files, one large vbk file and 6 smaller vrb files. If these files are being copied to an external HD in a post job script, how does Veeam handle rollback files that are beyond the period? Below is an example of the file layout for this setup after 2 weeks.

Can Veeam see the rollback1.vrb file on “External HD 1” on day 13 if I want to go back that far even if the backup job is set to only have 7 rollback periods?

D:\Veeam Backup\VM Servers
Main.vbk
Rollback1.vrb(removed on day 7)
Rollback2.vrb(removed on day
Rollback3.vrb(removed on day 9)
Rollback4.vrb(removed on day 10)
Rollback5.vrb(removed on day 11)
Rollback6.vrb(removed on day 12)
Rollback7.vrb(removed on day 13)
Rollback8.vrb
Rollback9.vrb
Rollback10.vrb
Rollback11.vrb
Rollback12.vrb
Rollback13.vrb

External HD 1
Main.vbk
Rollback1.vrb
Rollback2.vrb
Rollback3.vrb
Rollback4.vrb
Rollback5.vrb
Rollback6.vrb
Rollback7.vrb

External HD 2
Main.vbk
Rollback8.vrb
Rollback9.vrb
Rollback10.vrb
Rollback11.vrb
Rollback12.vrb
Rollback13.vrb

[Gostev]

Aaron, Veeam Backup automatically deletes rollback files beyond retention period in your "static" backup location. So all you really need to do with your script is just copy all existing files from "static" location to external drive. You don't even need a script, just a single copy command is fine. Hope this helps.