Importing Backup jobs

[davehux]

Hi from a Veeam newbie.

I am using Veeam 5 to backup 22 VMs onto 3 seperate NAS devices, which are in 3 different locations (all on our LAN - we have a large site) I'm using an incremental with CBT and synthetic fulls on a Sunday. Veeam is on a virtual machine.

In order to spread the backups for DR purposes, I have this backup regime:-
NAS1 - Mon, Wed, Fri
NAS2 - Tue, Wed
NAS3 - Saturday

I need to replicate a DR scenario where all the hosts and SANs have been destroyed (but at least one backup NAS survives), and our DR company have provided me with a couple of empty hosts, a SAN, and a standalone PC.

I install Veeam onto the local PC and import the backup from the 'surviving' NAS device, so that I can then restore the VMs to the new host/SAN

Here's the odd thing - the Saturday backup imports in about 30 seconds. The weekday backups can take upto an hour to import, but they do eventually import.
The NAS devices are Buffalo Terastations with RAID5 and on our gigabit backbone, so I don't think it's them.

Any clues or any comment/hints on my DR plans would be most welcome

Thanks

Dave

[Alexey D.]

Hello Dave,

Are you importing backups with or without catalog data? If the amount of catalog data is huge, the procedure can be slow. In your case, "Saturday's" import may be faster because it's not a working day - thus less changes were collected.

Also, as an option, you can skip import procedure itself and extract VMs directly from backup files.

[davehux]

Hi Alexey - I don't catalogue my backups - we use them as a full DR server restore, rather than at a file level.

Just an additional query. Am I right in thinking (hoping!!!!) that the Tuesday backup won't affect the Wednesday backup - on Wed, the backup will pick up all the changes since Monday's backup, and be unaware that a backup was taken by a different device and job on the Tuesday? Likewise the Thursday backup will backup all changes since Tuesday?

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, if you have separate jobs configured with those NAS devices, then there will be no issues, as changed block tracking is designed to handle such scenarios.