Restoring Incremental Backups Tooks Long Time to Process

[pascalcaron1]

Hello. I have some questions.

We have 2 different zones. Office Zone (OZ) and Disaster Recovery Zone (DRZ). They are not connected. They are in different buildings.

We are using Vmware Vsphere. We want to backup our VMs from OZ and transfer them to DRZ in a physical way and import them to Vmware Vsphere on DRZ.

But I don't want to transfer full backup everytime I transfer. So I've checked that you have option to create Incremental Backup.

While restoring full backups with delta backups (incremental backups) it takes time to restore first big full backup initially and later it restores the delta backups.

My question is;

I want to transfer full backup initially and restore full backup initially. But later I just want to import only delta backups. But its takes too much time to restore delta backups.

I have created a sample VM to test which is something like 4GB. And delta backups depends on the change of the data, so sometimes they are 40MB and sometimes near 100MB etc.

Think about a scenario where my backups are;
- Initial full backup as B1 which is 4 GB.
- First incremental backup as B2 which is 40 MB.
- Second incremental backup as B3 which is 100 MB.

For restoring full backup + delta backups it takes 5 minutes. (B1 + B2 + B3)

When I create a new delta backup, lets say as B4 which is 50 MB , it shouldn't take 5 minutes to restore if its a delta backup. But it again tooks 5 minutes to restore

In my opinion it should restore delta backup B4 in a short time (if full backup and consecutive delta backups are already restored).(B1 + B2 + B3 are already restored in VSphere. So only backup file to be restored is B4 but again it tooks something like 5 minutes)

Maybe I am making a mistake or maybe there is a limitaion?

Maybe it has some limitations I don't know.

I am expecting to delta backups should be restored in a short time. But it takes similar time like 5 minutes

Thanks

[foggy]

Hi Pascal, could you please clarify what do you mean by "restore"? Do you mean you're restoring the entire VM from each restore point? Haven't you thought of doing replication from backup instead?

[Egor Yakovlev]

Greetings Pascal and Welcome to the Forums!

You are doing it right, and there are no real limitations applied. Think of it from another angle - it doesn't mean if you restore VM from Full backup or 28th incremental - it takes same time! There is no loss of speed due to the back chain length.

The process you explained in your expectations(restore only B4 blocks) is applied only for "Recovery to Original Location" option you have in Veeam, where we can actually see which blocks are in production right now and move only B4 blocks during recovery - that is called "Quick Rollback" and you can see that checkbox during Full VM Recovery wizard. This option is not available when you use "Restore to a new location or with different settings" - Veeam has no knowledge of new vCenter you will pick in the process, nor we can find which blocks does VMDK of a previously restored VM consists of.

I don't have full details about your Disaster Recovery process, but if you want machines at DRZ to become available faster(after importing transferred backups to DRZ) you can use Instant VM Restore. It will publish new DRZ VMs instantly from said backups(by Instant I mean like 1 minute). Mounting with Instant VM Restore needs finalization - "Migrate to Production" option. That can be done at the background. No matter what, In case of need(disaster happened) you can simply run them(does not matter if mounted VM was 100% migrated from backup already or not).

Hope that helps!