Backup fileserver 4TB - best practise?

[Freekr]

Hello Guys,

I'm new to Veeam since this year, and from what i've seen so far i love it!
I'm not sure about the backup job i've setup for our vm file server containing about 4TB of data and growing.
I've setup an incremental job with 20 restore points and enabled the 'Synthetic full backup' every sunday. So every week i have a full backup file. The problem i experience is that the synthetic full backup runs for about 3 days... Not ideal.
This triggered me to reevalutatie the strategie and i would like to gain some advise on what is best practice for a larger fileserver.
I also would like to backup to tape mayby once a month so from what i've read a reversed incremental backup is not the best choice. What are my options here?

Many thanks for any advice.

Best regards,
F

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Freek,

What is your backup storage? If it is a dedupe device, you may consider running active full backup instead of creating the VBK file synthetically. As regards the backup to tape job, then if you just need one restore point on tapes once a month, then reversed incremental backup mode can also be used.

Thank you!

[foggy]

Freek, could you please tell us a bit about your target storage and how do you add it to Veeam B&R console as a repository? Probably it is not capable of the double I/O load that synthetic activity puts on it.

Regarding tape backup, reverse incremental is generally not recommended for offloading backups to tape since it always has a full backup as the latest restore point, while with forward incremental you can offload just the changes. However if you're going to copy to tapes on a monthly schedule and you have weekly fulls in between, you still have to copy full backup to tape, so in these terms backup method doesn't really matter.

[Freekr]

Hello Guys,

Thanks for replying!
I've setup a synology NAS as backup repository (CIFS).
I wouldn't mind backing up a single full backup file to tape without multiple restore points. I would only need the tape in 2 scenario's right?
1. disaster recovery when synology is unvailable
2. when i need files that are older then the oldest restore point on the synology

Please correct me if i'm wrong.

Best regards,
Freek

[veremin]

I would only need the tape in 2 scenario's right?

Correct.

[foggy]

I've setup a synology NAS as backup repository (CIFS).

This kind of storage being filled with regular hard drives provides too low IOPS to perform synthetic activity at decent speed.

[Freekr]

Thanks foggy for pointing that out. Can i assume that i'm using the correct backup method but i should increase performance for my backup target?
Or is there an other best practice for 4TB file server backup with the option to offload to tape?

Best regards,
Freek

[foggy]

You could try active fulls instead of synthetic ones. How long does the active full backup of the said VM take?