Linux FLR of mounted CIFS share

[FROGGYJ]

We have an EMC VNX 5300 Unified deployment with a NAS that we are presenting as CIFS. I have setup a Ubuntu 13.10 x64 desktop and mounted the CIFS share (trying to backup our NAS). I was successful in backing up, now when I go to do a file level restore the FLR loads fine and I am presented with the mounted CIFS folder, but there are 0 contents. Other system folders do have files listed. Is there something I'm missing or a better way to backup our NAS?

[Gostev]

Our product only backups virtual machines. There is no functionality to backup NAS shares. Please, review the System Requirements for more information. Thanks!

[FROGGYJ]

I'm aware veeam only backs up virtual machines which is what I'm doing, backing up a Linux vm, which just happens to have a share mounted. So if that doesn't work we can not use the NAS or use another backup product but I love veeam so looking to the community for any creative ideas, or perhaps there is something on the roadmap?

[tsightler]

Right, but a mount CIFS mount point does not make those files part of the VM, it's basically just a redirect that sends request to the NAS when file requests are made. You can't backup a NAS this way since the hypervisor is not going to know anything about this.

If you want to get creative you could attach a virtual disk to the Linux VM and setup an rsync script that runs once a day and syncs any changes from the CIFS to the virtual disk mount, then backup the Linux VM with Veeam. This should be pretty fast since rsync will only copy the changed files each day (and actually only the changes within those files) and if you then backup this VM you'd be able to restore files using the Linux FLR directly from Veeam.

[veremin]

Otherwise, you can put into use File Copy Job in order to copy files from the given share to whatever location you want to. Though, in this case, rsync seems to be preferable, as it's capable of recognizing and copying only changed files.

Thanks.