best method of syncing to ext hd

[eviljunglenoodle]

I need a little advice on the best method to use- I have a fairly simple setup with 10 vm's and a couple hosts, and am backing up to a mapped drive over the network- the full backup takes a half hour to an hour but the incrementals are lightning fast
What I'd like to do is be able to take the latest backup of the day offsite with me using a esata external drive which I have hooked to a physical server. So if I could run the full sometime at night and then throughout the day do incremental and then copy them to the external drive that would work, I assume I need a sync utility to do this so I could copy just new files to the external drive? I'd rather not re-copy the whole backup folder which fastscp is doing, just sync throughout the day so that at the end of the day I can grab the external which has the full and all the incrementals.
I considered using replication but I need to swap out different external drives. Just curious how most people are handling taking latest copies offsite or if they are just fine with losing a day or so if a disaster happened- Thanks!

[joergr]

Hmmm...if you have esata, copy speeds should be very fast when the actual hardware behind can take it. Thus, you could do reversed increments, result will be a every-day up to date vbk file which you could then copy to your esata drive. The vbk file will include everything and will always be at the latest state but ofcourse it will be a huge one.
best regards,
Joerg

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Chris,

Joerg is correct, I would also recommeng using Reversed Incremental mode, so you would need to sync a VBK file only.

In addition, we recommend using rsync to sync backup files offsite. Search this forum for offsite and rsync for more information from customers employing this technique > http://www.veeam.com/forums/search.php? ... ync+backup

Thank you!

[eviljunglenoodle]

I do like the reverse incremental and having veeam backup to my external hard drive is working great, however when I swap in a new hard drive it fails because it is missing the files- so I can manually do a full veeam backup and let it do reverse incrementals throughout the day automatically, is there a way to set it to make a full copy early morning automatically and then reverse incremental the rest of day? I see in the settings if I set full backup on to the same day that incrementals run it does a full. Using rsync doesn't really help as it tries to copy the whole vbk each time- Or am I best off to do traditional incremental to a local drive and use rsync to copy to my external? Can I set up Veeam to accomplish this simpler, I just want to be able to grab my external drive and swap another new one in without manually doing things, Thx,

C

[Vitaliy S.]

I do like the reverse incremental and having veeam backup to my external hard drive is working great, however when I swap in a new hard drive it fails because it is missing the files.

Actually, you can use a reg hack to change the default behavior that would allow you to continue job even if you swap the hard drives.
Take a look at this topic for mode details: Veeam Backup 4 & removable Media (nevermind the title, the instructions inside are also applicable to v5)

Using rsync doesn't really help as it tries to copy the whole vbk each time.

As far as I am aware and based on the posts from our customers I can tell that rsync allows transferring changes only.

[tsightler]

As far as I am aware and based on the posts from our customers I can tell that rsync allows transferring changes only.

Well, technically your both right. Rsync is basically useful for copying files between machines, not between filesystems on the same machine, the general idea being that the link between the machines is slower than the disk drives transfer rate (which is usually true for any WAN connected machines, but might no be true for 1Gb or 10Gb connected systems).

Basically, if rsync as a 100MB file on both two systems, let's call them SysA, and SysB, then it has to read all 100MB on both SysA and SysB, but it only has to send the blocks that are different between the two files. If you have two systems with large files connected by a 10Mb link, then having both systems read the files and transferring only the differences is a huge win, but if both the source and target disks on on the same system, rsync would generally not offer any value, and would likely even slow the system down.