Reverse Incremental VBK backups to USB (for offsite)

[adamg]

Hi everyone--

I was looking for your insight regarding a procedure we've been testing with some of our clients:

We have a reverse incremental job that runs on a nightly basis and saves to disk; after the job completes, we have a post-job script that copies the latest VBK file to a locally attached external USB drive (no other files are copied; just the .VBK file). If a previous VBK file exists on that USB drive, it is replaced with the latest VBK produced from the latest reverse incremental job.

Our recovery tests from the USB drive in our sandbox environment have so far all been successful. My question: does anyone see any problems or potential pitfalls from using the above scenario as an offsite recovery methodology? Or maybe something I'm missing that would enhance it?

Thanks--
Adam

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Adam,

Have you considered using backup copy jobs for this scenario? In this case you would have control over the entire process in Veeam backup console.

Thanks!

[adamg]

Thanks for the reply Vitaliy; we actually did consider and tried using the Backup Copy Job methodology but ran into some issues using multiple USB offsite backup drives. (It seems we were getting errors because using multiple USB drives was messing up the backup repositories as Veeam would be looking for certain files which didn't exist across multiple drives... if that makes sense.) Perhaps we had something configured wrong or there are new features in Veeam 8 that we should consider. In the meantime, our internal post-job script seems to be working and those VBKs are working great with our restore processes.

Thanks for your input!

--Adam

[Vitaliy S.]

Perhaps we had something configured wrong or there are new features in Veeam 8 that we should consider. In the meantime, our internal post-job script seems to be working and those VBKs are working great with our restore processes.

Could be... probably you were missing the required registry keys, that are now exposed as available options in the backup console. The benefit of using backup copy jobs is that you will only transfer latest restore points within the defined RPO, moreover you can pick what VMs to sync and define their own retention policy.

Anyway, if your current approach is working good for you, then I don't see any reasons to change that.