Need to Reduce Space Used by Veeam Backups

[tthomas1@ebsco.com]

Hello,

I am a Veeam newbie (just a few months in) so I'm hoping someone here has encountered my issue. We are trying to spec out an older Dell server to ship to one of our company's small offices to be a Veeam backup server. We want to do 14 days' retention (1 full + 6 incremental per week) which should take ~16 TB of space. If we add some space for growth, in theory, we need ~18 - 20 TB on the Veeam backup server. However, I'm aware that Veeam has to retain the first 7 days' worth of backups for all but the last day of week #3 since it can only delete an entire chain, not individual day's backups. Retaining that extra week's worth adds a lot to our requirements. We would need ~24 TB + room for growth, so ~26 - 28 TB. We're trying to only buy what we really need as this office is on a tight budget. Does anyone have suggestions for how to configure the backup to truly retain only two week's worth of content? Would appreciate any advice!

[foggy]

Hi Tim, take a look at the forever forward incremental backup method, it will take only the space required for the number of restore points you specify. Also, here's a helpful tool for space calculation - should be handy.

[tthomas1@ebsco.com]

Thank you foggy! The space calculator is especially helpful. Regarding forever forward, isn't that approach a little risky? What if the initial full or any backup in the chain gets corrupted? I did read some of the Backup & Replication documentation on this, so I do see there are safeguards, but nonetheless would like to hear more about this!

[Gostev]

You can enable storage-level corruption guard feature in Veeam, this will detect and automatically heal any data corruptions.

And as an additional layer of protection, you can use ReFS which has its own data integrity streams. ReFS also makes forever-incremental backup work much faster thanks to block cloning.

But even more important is to test your backups periodically (you can do it automatically with SureBackup). Because in the past years, there were a few CBT data corruption bugs which even periodic fulls did not help with.

[tthomas1@ebsco.com]

Thank you @gostev! In the best practices guide (link below), it says the following:

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It is highly discouraged to use storage-level corruption guard on any storage that performs native "scrubbing" to detect silent data corruptions. Such storage will automatically heal silent data corruptions from parity disks or using erasure coding. This is the case for most deduplication appliances.
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Our target will be a physical Windows 2016 server, and we will run Copy jobs to replicate the backup to a NetApp LUN at our main headquarters. For the NetApp LUN, I assume the above comment means we don't need to enable the storage guard feature. Is that accurate? For the physical Windows server, if we enable ReFS, would we still benefit from enabling the feature (regardless of backup type)?

https://bp.veeam.expert/job_configurati ... tion-guard

[Gostev]

You will benefit from enabling this feature on every storage, otherwise with storage own integrity checking mechanisms we're talking fox guarding a henhouse. It's not uncommon when the storage reports no errors, but the data block being unreadable. This can happen with any storage, for example we saw this issue with NetApp at one of our customers.

[tthomas1@ebsco.com]

Thank you @gostev! So does this mean the Best Practice Guide statement is inaccurate? It says it is "highly discouraged" to use the feature on storage that performs native scrubbing.

[Gostev]

Yes, it's not accurate. I believe the main reason that this is discouraged is poor performance of deduplicating storage devices in general, which makes backup health check process run for too long and create additional load on what is already a slow storage device. Just one of many issues with using deduplicating storage appliances...

[tthomas1@ebsco.com]

Okay thanks for the advice gostev!