At all possible to automate independent disk copy/backup?

[timofcourse]

Has anyone found a work around to allow copying or backing up of independent disks of a VM? Specifically, I'm wondering if its possible to copy the un-provisioned image of the disk as that is much smaller than whats provisioned in VMware. Does this make sense? Is this possible?

Thanks!

[foggy]

How about using File Copy job to copy these disks?

[timofcourse]

I've tried that and it copies over the full provisioned sized disk. I noticed that doing a vSphere datastore "download" does the same thing, so this is probably more of a VMware thing than a Veeam thing. Does anyone happen to know if it's possible to download the unprovisioned sized disk?

[veremin]

Hi, Tim.

You mean the actual used space? I believe, it’s neither possible with VMware nor with Veeam, since both have to with VMs and their corresponding files rather than with files of Guest operating system.

So, if you’re not ok with copying whole virtual disk, you should stick to “copying guest files” scenario.

Thanks.