Multiple repositories?

[bbricker]

I recently setup some VB&R Copy jobs a couple weeks ago. After briefly reading/skimming through the admin guide section about Copy jobs, I apparently misunderstood how it would work and thought each Copy job would transform things regularly to keep only one VBK and then just store VIB changes for each archive restore point I asked for (last 6 days, last 4 weekends, the last 4 months, 1 annual). That was obviously wrong as I discovered a few days ago when my 14TB repo on the DR server started running out of space. I guess I can understand why the Copy process works that way since the risk of losing a single VBK that is a year old could spell disaster for the rest of the jobs in the chain. I will say I am disappointed, is there not a better way to scale out many restore points without keeping all these massive VBKs?

ANYWAY- the point to my question, I've run out of space on my new VB&R DR repo server. I figured, okay no problem, until I figure out a better solution, I'll just add a 2nd repo to the DR VB&R server, and tell the Copy jobs to use it. Maybe I'm missing something, but how do you tell a job to use multiple repos? I can only build max size 14TB LUNs on my DR SAN, so I've got 2 x 14TB LUNs/drives on the VB&R Windows DR server but can't see a way to get Veeam to utilize the 2nd one as needed. How do you scale repo size for backup/copy jobs where the first repo is not going to be able to satisfy it? Surely I am just missing a config setting or am not setting it up properly.

[bbricker]

...and yes I know I could just concatenate multiple LUNs from my SAN on the Windows server using Windows disk management, but that seems kind of janky and an extra layer to break. Hopefully there is a built-in solution within Veeam to scale out more repos?

[veremin]

Maybe I'm missing something, but how do you tell a job to use multiple repos?

Single job can use single repository. You can copy existing backup files to a newly-created repository, and map your backup job to those files afterwards. Thanks.

[Shestakov]

Hello,

After briefly reading/skimming through the admin guide section about Copy jobs, I apparently misunderstood how it would work and thought each Copy job would transform things regularly to keep only one VBK and then just store VIB changes for each archive restore point I asked for (last 6 days, last 4 weekends, the last 4 months, 1 annual). That was obviously wrong as I discovered a few days ago when my 14TB repo on the DR server started running out of space.

Note, that backup copy jobs have 2 types of retention: Simple and GFS(historical). Simple retention applies to the most recent restore points and as you said contains 1 Full + Increments, while GFS retention works with historical backups which are all VBK file(full backups). That`s the reason why you have more data on your repositories than you thought.

Thanks.

[Gostev]

Hopefully there is a built-in solution within Veeam to scale out more repos?

Not at this time, but we are considering as a potential future enhancement.

[bbricker]

Thanks for the responses. How are people scaling out their backup storage using Veeam? What is the work-around? Just make multiple jobs/copy jobs that point at different repos and hope that I can correctly calculate the future space needed for each?

[Gostev]

That is correct. There are also Veeam ONE reports that help with capacity planning.