Back up a group of machines one at a time

[gwen59800]

Hello and sorry in advance if this question has been asked in the past, but I haven't found an answer to my question.

I'd like to know if it's possible with B&R12 to create a backup group of several VMs.
But the backup should not do everything at once, but backup one VM at a time and when it finishes its VM, it moves on to the next one in the group list.

If yes, what is the process?
Thank you for your help.

[Gostev]

Hello! Let's rather start from understanding what is it exactly that you are trying to achieve by backing up only one VM at a time. Could you provide more details on your need? Then we will be able to provide a much better answer on how this can be best achieved with Veeam. Thanks!

[gwen59800]

Hello Gostev and thank you for taking the time to reply.

My task is to find a way to back up several virtual machines. Before, we had one step per machine with one hour each. Today, the servers are changing, we're moving from Veeam11 to 12 and we want to make it easier to view VM backups. That's why I want to create a request that contains all the machines to be backed up. To limit the use of resources and bandwidth, we want a single machine to be backed up one after the other, and not all at once.
This would optimize backup time by giving only one start time, and Veeam would take care of backing up the machines one after the other. There would be no downtime between two machines, or conversely, no time when two machines would be backed up at the same time.
VMs are spread over several sites that communicate with each other, and each site would have its own backup start time.

I hope I've made myself clear.
Thank you for your time.

Have a nice day.

[gwen59800]

Hi, there,

I've done some tests and I've confirmed that when you create a job with a group of machines and the backup repository is configured to accept only one or two simultaneous copies, everything is done one after the other.

However, in my configuration, I create a backup copy in order to send my backups to another location, but I can't do it in reverse incremental like my initial backup.

Is this configurable?

Thanks

[Gostev]

Correct, Veeam takes care of limiting concurrency automatically, this capability has been in the product for over 10 years now. The concurrency is configured with "task slots" on backup proxies and a backup repository involved in the corresponding job. The job will never exceed the total number of available task slots, whichever is greater (either repository task slots or SUM of task slots of all proxies selected for the job). Note that the task is a "VM disk", as opposed to the actual VM.

Backup Copy jobs never supported reversed incremental backup mode. There's also no good reason to use this mode even for primary jobs these days: there are no technical benefits, only drawbacks. We plan to discontinue this backup mode in future, so I recommend you avoid deploying at least your new jobs like that.

[gwen59800]

Thank you, Gostev, for all these clarifications. You have been a great help and for that I sincerely thank you.

Have a nice day.

[Servior]

Backup Copy jobs never supported reversed incremental backup mode. There's also no good reason to use this mode even for primary jobs these days: there are no technical benefits, only drawbacks. We plan to discontinue this backup mode in future, so I recommend you avoid deploying at least your new jobs like that.

Maybe a bit off topic, but how do you handle backup to tape (write full backup to tape each day) without reverse incremental mode?

You can use forever forward incremental and use virtual full on tape each day. But that won’t allow an active or synthetic full backup once per week. There are workarounds with powershell, but I hate such workarounds. So reverse incremental has still its use, because both is possible at the same time.

[Gostev]

This is best discussed with the tape PM team in the corresponding subforum. Good chance there's a solution already in V12, but if not - they will take feedback on your use case and add what's missing before reverse incremental is deprecated. As of course, exporting data to tape should not require that backup files are created in a certain specific way. This makes no sense even just because we can backup directly to object storage today, where there are no backup files to start with!