Configuring Backup Repositories with Rotated Drives

[pierluigid]

Hello I need some help about Rotated HDs

My Environment : 2 Physical DELL servers - ESXi 5.5 Up2 (essential Plus) with Vcenter and many VMs ( mostly Windows Servers)
Storage : HP MSA 2040 Fiber Channel - Veeam Bk e Replication 9.0 Up1

At the moment I have “Backup Jobs” and “Replication Jobs” doing very well without problem
I also have a “Backup Copy Job” where the source is the “Backup Job” and the target a SuperMicro physical Server with Centos.
This SuperMicro/Centos has a HP Tape (LTO 3) and I use this for a rotated cartridges in a GFS schema for OFF SITE Disaster recovery.
The problem is that I need more space so I have two possibility:
1) Buy a new tape (HP Ultrium 6250 SAS) with about 15 new LTO6 cartridges for about 3000 Euros .... or .....
2) I could (and I’m) investigating the possibilities to use USB 3.0 Hard Drive 2.5” portable in a Rotated configuration schema.

So, I bought 2 HD USB 3.0 2TB 2.5” Western Digital for about 85 Euros each one and I created a new “backup Copy Job”...
(well I know, with rotated drives, I can’t have a full backup GFS schema inside the Veeam job and also I can’t use a per-VM to store the backup).
In fact … rotating just 2 HD with 2 Restore points in the job, I have this situation ( every days I exchange the drives):

Day 1 : HD number 1 : full Backup day 1
Day 2 : HD number 2 : full Backup day 2
Day 3 : HD number 1 : full Backup day 1 + incremental (two day)
Day 4 : HD number 2 : full Backup day 2 +incremental (two days)
Day 5 : HD number 1 : merge the full and incremental day 3 to a new full + incremental
Day 6 : HD number 2 : merge the full and incremental day 3 to a new full + incremental
And so on ….

In the near future I’m goint to buy more HD so I can use a GFS rotation HD to have offline backup for disaster recovery.

First,… what do you think about this? Did you think something about this for an off site Backup?
And … a little problem…:

Maybe in the future I need to restore son files/VM from older backups ....
Inside Veeam I can see and restore the last 2 restore point inside the last HD used … BUT ....
... what about If I would restore from previous HDs (older backups) ?

Well I thought... . I just need to connect one of the previuos HD and do a Rescan repository from Veeam so I could restore for example a VM older than 2 restore points.
BUT I can’t … the possibility is gray out in Veeam.
Well I thought .. I can try with the Veeam Extractor Utility v9 … but in this case I can work only with the Full Backup and not the incremental ….

Am I missing something? What can I do?
Many thanks in advance and best regards.

Pierluigi

[PTide]

Hi,

First,… what do you think about this? Did you think something about this for an off site Backup?

Good plan, especially in terms of efficiency/price ratio.

what about If I would restore from previous HDs (older backups) ?

Then you just import older backups and perform a restore.

BUT I can’t … the possibility is gray out in Veeam.

You cannot rescan rotated drive backed repositorty. Uncheck rotated media option in repo settings and perform rescan. After the restore is done check it back. Another option is to trigger rescan via PowerShell.

Thanks


[MODERATOR UPDATE]: The information above is wrong as the mentioned rescan workaround might cause the same problem as Import from rotated media. Case #01959565

[pierluigid]

Hi PTide,

I did what you told me. It works fine ....... I didn't think about that possibility
Thank you very very much PTide
Now I can go away with my idea about Rotated drives ...

Pierluigi