File Server Hourly Incremental Backups with Shadow Copies

[veeeammeupscotty]

To achieve our desired RPO, we want to start backing up our Windows file servers with Veeam on an hourly basis (this includes terabytes of data on deduplication-enabled NTFS volumes). We also currently have Shadow Copies enabled, taking snapshots 6 times a day. Couple of questions regarding this configuration:

[*]Is it important to ensure that scheduled shadow copy creation doesn't interfere with Veeam hourly incremental backups? What would happen if they overlap?
[*]Would it be better to create synthetic fulls at a more regular interval than weekly considering that 24 restore points will be created each day?

[Dima P.]

Hello JP,

- In case of schedule overlap second activity most likely fail since snapshot creation is not possible.
- You are the one to decide. Regular synthetic fulls will consume more space, but will cause retention to work more frequently.

[foggy]

Since dedupe is enabled inside guest OS, your increments will be huge and synthetic fulls could take significant time. You should test, chances are active fulls will be overall faster.

[veeeammeupscotty]

Veeam is on Server 2016 with ReFS and fast clone has been great even with deduplication turned on. However, my main concern is if there is some kind of a limit or threshold we might hit with synthetic fulls, whether they are performed daily or weekly, where the chain becomes so long that processing won't complete in a timely or efficient manner.

[foggy]

You can define that by running some test, since there are too many variables to guess.