VM FILE SHARE BACKUP

[Koldov]

Finally got the guts to pull the trigger on moving the 350GB+ staff shares to a VM!!! I also changed the server from BIOS/MBR to GPT/UEFI (yes it's that old), deleted some old drives/shares and doing all the other half-term jobs, so it's been a busy week so far...

 

I used 'Windows Admin Center' and 'Storage Migration Service', it went OK eventually but it wasn't quite as easy and straightforward as the Microsoft Engineer made it look on his 7 minute video...

 

I moved the server name with the shares so I didn't have to remap everything, so next comes the massive task of changing over everything else (Veeam, FSRM, Scheduled Tasks and trying not to forget turning ABE back on and all those other little things that I've tinkered with over the years - and that I'll only remember about when everyone comes back next week)...

 

Anyway, backups... I was using a hybrid Veeam/WSB set-up where Veeam did the VMs (and one job for the physical Host OS) and then WSB for the shares, all to rotated USB drives for offsite storage (we also have Redstor doing SIMS and some VIP shares).

 

I like how that worked but now the shares are on a VM should I just add it to the rest of the Veeam VM jobs?

 

How easy is it to fire up and pop out a single file that needs restoring (because some teacher deleted it last week and it's really, really important), because WSB was really easy.

 

Do I need to get Veeam to read and 'mount/restore' the whole 400GB VM backup or is there some sort of file browser (might be obvious for some, but I've never used it for file restores)..

 

Edit: If it matters, we are using the Free Community edition of Veeam B&R (so there is no 'Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager')

Edited February 21, 2024 by Koldov

[Koldov]

Also can someone explain how much 'free' space is needed on a volume for Veeam to do a backup?

 

I've had it before and I'm sure I've seen a post on here about it (but can't find it now) where if the volume where the Hyper-V VMs are has very little free space, Veeam will fail...

 

Not sure if that's how it went, but pretty sure I'm remembering correctly... Only now I've got an extra 400GB VM that volume is pretty much full!!!

Edited February 21, 2024 by Koldov

[Davit2005]

You shouldn't need to backup the files on a VM if the VM is backed up by Veeam as a separate backup. I don't know about WSB I should imagine that is the same. If the files are on different storage to the VM i.e. iSCSI share then it would be different. We did have a scenario where we wanted to backup the SQL backups at more frequent time at a previous place so we setup a specific backup for that.

[old_n07]

Another thing to consider for the file share is previous versions (shadow copies), this will allow the users to restore files themselves if they accidentally delete or overwrite a file.