Veaam backups

[chrisgreenwood]

Hi

 

We just moved over to Veaam (the free one) today, did some test backups and its working fine (not tried vm restore though)

 

We use to use azure backup but we had constant issues over the years and constant errors, license had expired so decided it was time to move on.

 

Veaam has been great and alot easier to set up, our server is about 12tb in capacity.

 

I am wondering what would the best retention been, obviously i have full VM backups (2TB in total inc Sims, 2 generic servers we use, RDP and iDstore) and i have set up some file backups.

 

Do i leave it for a while (week or month) as i've currently got it set up and then see how much space we have then go from there?

[willtech]

If it helps their is a backup capacity calculator: https://calculator.veeam.com/vbr/

[chrisgreenwood]

Thanks Will

 

Just wondering about the best way to check if the vms backups are actually working?

 

We have the community edition

[Jcx500]

You can set veeam to email you every morning to see how the backup went , for larger environments you can also use veeamone for reporting / backup monitoring

[dmj]

Just wondering about the best way to check if the vms backups are actually working?

 

Automate a weekly restore into a new environment and notify on failure. Ideally you could use this test environment to test any changes before applying them to the production system, thus integrating your backup/restore procedure into testing procedures.

[penfold]

Thanks Will

 

Just wondering about the best way to check if the vms backups are actually working?

 

We have the community edition

 

When I was using Veeam we regularly held some kind of DR test to ensure that the backups are reliable. Waiting until you need to do this is too late to find out you have problems. We regularly used file restore, but we also restored some smaller systems from full restore to make sure we knew how to do it. We also spun up a test instance of ESXI and restored a server to make sure we could do a restore should we get complete failure and we needed to rebuild our SAN and restore from off site backups. While I haven't used Veeam for a few years now, I regularly used it to spin up "test" environments using our existing systems in a sandboxed environment to help with complex upgrades - this also confirmed that the backups were working as expected.

 

I'm not sure what you can do with the free version, but you really need to check that you can restore from complete failure. You don't want the stress of working out how to do a full restore at the time you need to do it. We had a scheduled process of something like every quarter where someone in the team performed a full restore following the document we created so knowledge was shared between the team.

[mdrabble]

Automate a weekly restore into a new environment and notify on failure. Ideally you could use this test environment to test any changes before applying them to the production system, thus integrating your backup/restore procedure into testing procedures.

 

Didn’t know you could automate restores like that. I’ve always done manual a test restores.

 

I’ve even done a worst case scenario test by rebuilding veeam server from scratch and restoring from immutable backups.