Backing up one large server with multiple jobs

[ChuckS42]

Warning: This will sound crazy.

I have a large VM (~10TB), and find I can no longer use Forever Incrementals to back it up. However, running an Active Full backup takes days and is very disruptive. So I have this crazy notion of splitting the work up in multiple jobs, each job backing up different disks, and each doing an Active Full on a different night of the week. First off, is this doable? Secondly, what if on a given night more than one of these jobs is running at the same time? Third, am I completely insane?

[veremin]

I have another idea for you - update to version 8, and put new forever forward incremental backup mode into use. Once everything is set up, regular active full backups won't be required any longer. Thanks.

[ChuckS42]

Already on Veeam 8, and have found I cannot use forever forward incrementals. See this post.

[Gostev]

What you are suggesting is doable, but I would not go this route (no consistent entire VM backup). I would rather provision a dedicated volume to backup this one VM to, instead of using Dell DR6000.

[nunciate]

I have a File server with many 2Tb drives. Total used space is 10Tb and I am able to backup the entire VM just fine with v8.0. This is our primary group share server so it has quite a bit of change.
I use the Forever Incremental Mode with Synthetic Full and Reverse incremental every Thursday night. I do my full on Thursday as I dedicate that night for that server so that no other synthetic full operations occur on my my storage. Also, it gives me extra time to get it to tape after it finishes. The key is to have this backup on storage that can handle the reverse incremental mode and don't put anything else on it.

I actually used to do exactly what you are saying. We ran that way for quite a while doing multiple jobs. 1st job would get the VM and C: drive. The next would get the first 2Tb drive and so on. I would have them chained so that the second job would start when the first finished and so on. It works just fine but you will never be able to bring the entire VM back in 1 shot. You can restore the VM with the C: drive and then each drive 1 at a time but that is your best hope. We wanted the ability to do an instant restore of the entire VM so that is why I switched back.

One drawback to having an very large VM in a single backup is the file restore. It takes a good 10 minutes to bring the backup online and restore windows files sometimes.

[Vitaliy S.]

Thanks for sharing you experience, Alan.

[ChuckS42]

Update: We determined that under the circumstances, we would no longer use Veeam to back up these large data volumes until such time as the storage vendor (Dell) can support synthetic-style backups. (Building a new storage system just for this purpose is not feasible.) We will instead rely on array replication with our NimbleStorage arrays.