Backup, excluding a disk (Without increasing snapshots)

[Bart1982]

Hi There,

We;ve got a large autodesk vault server (ADMS) which requires to be backed up. Backups start at 5pm and run all the way through 4AM in the morning. During that backup window about 550GB worth of data is being transferred to the backup destination.

Autodesks recommands to keep the backup on the same server and not to use external storage like a NAS as the primary target. (If required: Autodesk recommends to copy the data from the local disk to an external NAS after the autodesk backup script has finished its works)


Therefore the server exists of the following drivers:
C: 60GB OSdisk
D: 650GB Datadisk
P: 10GB Pagefile
U: 1500GB Backups

In the evening a Autodesk vault script runs which:
- Delete everything from the yesterday backup folder U:\Backup\Yesterday
- Moves all data from U:\Backup\Today to U:\Backup\Yesterday
(simplified, these tasks take a few minutes to run)
- Backups Database (secondary server) and Vault Files from the D: drive to U:\Backup\Today
(Runs from 17:15 to +/- 4am)

We then have to backup everything with Veeam which also takes quite a bit of time due to the amount of changed data.

With the recommendations of autodesk , I would like the new script to do the following:
- Empty the local backup location: U:\Backup\Current (just delete everything which is in there)
(shouldn't take long)
- Backups Database (secondary server) and Vault Files from the D: drive to U:\Backup\Current
(Runs from 17:15 to +/- 4am)
- Delete everyting from NASDevices\Backup\Yesterday
- Move all data from NASDevices\Backups\Today to NASDevices\Backup\Yesterday
(These tasks shouldn't take much longer then a few minutes, so backup can still start at 17:15)
- Copy all data from U:\Backup\Current to NASDevices\Backups\Today

All this from above is easy to implement and shouldn;t be a problem at all.

When this is all implemented I would like to exclude the U: Drive from the daily Veeam backup and do archiving in a different way (again,this won't be a problem either).

Now comes my problem, sometimes the autodesk vault backup script takes much longer then expected and overlaps with my Veeam job. Lets assume that veeam kicks in half way during the process (around 200GB),

The autodesk script continues to do its magic, but a snapshot now exists on the Virtual machine, even with a disk exclusion in Veeam the snapshot continues to grow substantially on the SAN, veeam will not look at the data, but the VM has to commit its snapshot data after the veeam job has been completed.

If I cannot use an external device like a NAS, what are my options not to have all of the data in a VM snapshot and not have veeam to back it up? Could I use a RDM to a dedicated LUN? Disk in independent mode maybe?

Thanks!

[PTide]

Hi,

The first thing that comes up to my mind is to setup a pre-job script that makes Veeam to check if the autodesk script is still running and if so wait for X more minutes.

Is that an option for you?

[alanbolte]

This seems like a good use case for independent mode, if the script idea doesn't work out for you.