Storage Level Corruption Guard

[tthomas1@ebsco.com]

Hello,
We are running v11 of Veeam Backup & Replication and currently not using Storage Level Corruption Guard. I believe this is the right course of action based on our setup but would love feedback in case we are missing something!

Our specific scenario: I have two remote offices that back up file servers + a couple other servers to a physical Veeam server at each location. We do an active full once a month and incrementals the rest of the month. We do not run corruption guard under this setup since we are using Active Full. We have Backup Copy jobs for both locations, each set to Immediate Mode. The target repository is on NetApp LUNs in a Windows VM at our main headquarters. The NetApp in question is an All-Flash system and is blazingly fast with all efficiency jobs turned on. Based on a best practice article (see link below), I believe it makes sense to leave Storage Level Corruption Guard off for these backups as well since they are on a "deduplicating appliance" (article says it is "highly discouraged" to use SLCG in this situation).

The reason I am asking is that I actually JUST turned SLCG off on the Backup Copy target. I was wondering why it was not running the nightly incremental copy and it was because the SLCG was still running from several days ago. After reading up on things I disabled it as it appears to match with best practices. Would love any feedback or suggestions!

Best Practice Article
https://bp.veeam.com/vbr/4_Operations/O ... orage.html

[PetrM]

Hi Tim,

Since you run active ful just once per month, I'd recommend to enable SLCG for your primary backups. I believe that it makes sense to verify primary backups before you send it to the secondary repository. Also, keep in mind that SureBackup might be another great option to validate existing backups and be sure about data integrity.

Thanks!

[tthomas1@ebsco.com]

Thank you PetrM! I could enable SLCG on the primaries, but what about the guidance I've seen in some Veeam documentation that it's not needed when you do Active Full backups?

Also, you made me realize I forgot a key detail. For the Backup Copy jobs, I actually run a WEEKLY full backup. Again this is using Immediate Mode. If I understand correctly I believe this is synthetic, which means it would make sense to run SLCG, HOWEVER since it's on the NetApp AFF I'm thinking that means there's no need for SLCG. Again, looking for any suggestions!

[PetrM]

There won't be a particular need in SLCG if you run weekly full backups, however I'd enable it anyway: what if there is a corrupted increment? In your case, you have daily incrementals and just one full point per month, that's why I believe that SLCG is useful for primary backups in your case. Speaking about backup copy, I don't think that it's a really key detail how often do you run full as it uses primary backups as a source of data anyway.

Thanks!

[tthomas1@ebsco.com]

Okay, thank you for your thoughts PetrM!