Rotating backup to external drives

[pjbryant]

Just started evaluation of 6.5 and the basic setup works, but we'd appreciate some guidance on best (or at least good!) practice. Installation is a reasonably large SME setup (1 VC, a handful of ESX hosts, fewer than 100 VM's - although quite a few are unchanging test VM's). Full backup fits onto a single external Firewire/USB drive and has tested out OK. Approach is primarily for a DR style backup, but obviously it'll be a great complement (and in the medium term possibly a replacement) for more traditional data led backups.

For now backups are set not to truncate logs on any exchange/sql setups so that the current backup controls that aspect.

But I have a couple of questions to which I cannot find definite answers (in the help, or here):
* the ForceCreateMissingVBK registry hack for rotating external drives first identified in v4 still seems to be current in v6, so assume it is so for 6.5 - can anyone confirm? This post http://forums.veeam.com/viewtopic.php?f ... VBK#p32661 references the new location for the Key for v5 (FWIW)
* reverse incremental is talked about as best, but i haven't found anything that says it really has to be that way (although these seems to logical if you want to restore from one and only 1 external drive) - can someone confirm that this is really the only safe approach?

Thanks in anticipation, Peter

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Peter,

1. Yes, this registry key also works in v6.5 and has to be created where all other Veeam existing/default values are already present.
2. Correct. With reversed incremental backup mode the VBK file will contain the most recent VM data and only this file will be required to perform the restore of backed up VMs.

Thanks!

[pjbryant]

Thanks Vitaliy. Good to know, but one corollary if I may?

If the first backup is a standard incremental, rather than reverse, can I just modify the job settings to Reverse and run again to switch mode? Or should remove the VM from the backup and start with a fresh VBK?

Cheers

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, you can do it. The full run will be automatically triggered at the next job run after switching.

[pjbryant]

Roger that, in progress, see how it goes.
Thanks Vitaliy

[pjbryant]

and of course, you need to run the reverse incremental on all jobs that backup to the removeable disk before you change disks