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Backup type choices, is one better than the other (physical server housing site share)

  • 16 November 2021
  • 3 comments
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S
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The setup is as follows

Physical server Windows 2022 with OS drive (mirrored 500GB) and DATA drive (RAID6 22TB), this server is domain joined and will contain a Windows file share for the site users on the 22TB drive.  The NTFS permissions setup is vital and will use Active Directory Groups.  The current size of shared data is 4TB.

Veeam B&R Ver11 server (community) is not domain joined, has about 45TB of SAS attached storage

Three backup choices for physical server

  1.  Backup job, File Share,  Files and Folders, choose the site share to backup nightly, keep all file versions for 12 months
  1.  My other thought was doing a Backup job, Windows Computer, Server, Entire Computer, Retention policy (only has days) not sure about this as I want more retention but understand the 7 days is about “whole computer” restore, whereas my retention needs are for the share data
  1.  Go to the physical Windows 2022 server and install the Veeam Windows Agent to get a bare metal restore backup setup and have it be managed by the Veeam server (have not actually walked through this yet)

My thought process has me only backing up the shared data on the physical server because as long as I have that I’m good, but my uncertainty has me paralyzed.

I’d appreciate and words of wisdom or thoughts on how to set this up, correctly.  I know the choices all cover the data but the retention on #2 is odd, not sure about #3 retention.

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Best answer by Tom T PCC 16 November 2021, 21:09

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Tom T PCC
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Make sure you follow 3-2-1-1-0

3-2-1-1-0 Golden Backup Rule | Veeam Community Resource Hub

 

At a minimum, You’ll want a backup job, which is configured to then start a copy job destined for another repository offsite. Configure retention within the GFS settings, to your company standards. A good rule of thumb is to have a week or two of dailies, a few weeks of weeklies, several months of monthlies, and a few years of yearlies.

Creating Backup Copy Jobs for VMs and Physical Machines - User Guide for Microsoft Hyper-V (veeam.com)

Linking Backup Jobs to Backup Copy Jobs - User Guide for Microsoft Hyper-V (veeam.com)

 

And review security best practices

Secure - Veeam Backup & Replication Best Practice Guide

Chris.Childerhose
Userlevel 7
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If you are only concerned about the data then Option #1 is the best bet and including GFS as well as the 3-2-1-1-0 rule mentioned should suffice.

You have OS protection with RAID1 mirror and your data drive in RAID6 so that covers it from hardware side.

If you have to you rebuild the server OS and the data drive then restore the share data from backup.

Chris Childerhose - VMCA2022 | VMCE2023 | Veeam Vanguard 7* | Veeam Legend 3* | vExpert 5* | VCAP-DCV/VCP-DCV | Object First Ace | Cisco Champion | Twitter: @cchilderhose | Blog Site – https://just-virtualization.tech
M
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You state you’re using “Veeam B&R Ver11 server (community)” so my first question to you is: Is this a production system?

You should only use community version for home/demo and/or testing purposes. If production you really need to purchase VUL’s under one of the other offerings.

Depending on your Veeam version, you have options for Instant Restore, which I’ve used in past with hardware failure that I don’t recall as part of the community version. Also, the 3-2-1 rule as @chris.childerhose mentioned though also depends on your RTO’s and RPO’s. I suggest you define these requirements first in order to help ensure whatever plan you put in place will return the results you require. 

As far as physical server backups, I haven’t run physical other than for hosts since going virtual years ago. If you only have the one physical file server then likely I’d backup the host, the data files both on-prem and off prem. The other thing I like to do is have a DFS server for my file servers. For any of my on-prem file servers I use a DFS in Azure/AWS since my file servers are very important too. This way I not only have the DFS failover, I have on-prem backup and off prem backup with 7 Daily, 5 Weekly, 12 monthly and 7 annuals.

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