asked on

VEEAM - How to do incremental backups on the backupserver even if the full backup is not in place anymore?

Hello,

I have a question regarding VEEAM Backup. We have many vSphere VMs which have terabytes of data. The typical backup strategy is to backup the VMs to disk and afterwards to tape as I know. We have enough space on the backup server to store the full backups but not for the incremental.

So I want to store the full backups on tape and afterwards delete it from the backup server. But VEEAM can not find the full backup anymore, so it starts a full backup instead of the incremenal. Is there a way to achieve what I want or are there any better strategies?

Any suggestions? Thank you in advance.

Bernhard

Sebastian Talmon

If you have only space for one full backup: with forever incremental or reverse incremental backup mode, you only need space for one full and the increments (although it is recommended to have space for one additional full in case you want to defragment the full backup, or for staging a restore from tape).

Starting with Windows Server 2016, you can also benefit from space saving with ReFS as filesystem and synthetic full backups in Veeam (will link blocks together instead of writing multiple copies of the same block)

Bernhard Lutz

ASKER

Hello,

thank you for your fast response. The problem is that I have not enough space to store every full backup I need. So I wanted to create one full backup of every VM -> store it on tape -> delete them from the server to free disk space -> and only continue to make incremental backups. Is this possible?

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Sebastian Talmon

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

Bernhard Lutz

ASKER

Unfortunately not. Thank you for the information!

Bernhard Lutz

ASKER

I have one more question. Is the File-to-Tape job really not recommend to use? If so, do you know why?

Sebastian Talmon

File-to-Tape Jobs have some Performance limitations if you want to copy thousands of files. They improved it in the last few versions. If you just need to copy a few database dumps or other big files, File-to-Tape is a great Option. But it is not that useful for transfering millions of small files (for example full server contents) directly to tape.