I had a frugal customer have the need for me to utilize USB
hard drives as an offsite backup with Veeam.
There were a few goofy challenges involved in doing this, so I thought I’d
summarize it for you all. First, I know
of the existence of backup copy jobs in Veeam.
They are too complicated for my needs.
I simply want a FULL backup to USB in addition to the incrementals my regular
job makes. Why? Well, say my incrementals are corrupt some
how? Maybe I don’t need to back up EVERY
VM for offsite? Plus I don’t need all of
the retention of the incrementals on my main job.
Windows-
The challenge here is, you need to keep the drive letter the
same when the client rotates the drives.
I utilized a utility called USBDLM.
It’s a pretty simple utility, but I had to play with it to basically
figure out that it does a LOT more than we need it to.
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Unzip them into C:\Program Files\USBDLM
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Create a file called USBDLM.INI, in it put the
following and NOTHING ELSE. I used drive
letter “A”, but you can use whatever you want.
[DriveLetters]
Letter1=A
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Run the _install batch file to install it as a
service, run the _start batch file to start it.
From here on out, whenever you connect ANY USB drive it will
always be the drive letter specified in the USBDLM.INI.
Veeam-
Pretty straight forward, set up. First you’re going to create a repository. Make sure your first USB drive is connected,
make a directory to store your backups (if you want, you don’t have to).
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Open Veeam, go to Backup Infrastructure, and
click on Backup Respositories.
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Right click, Add Backup Repository.
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I called mine “Offsite”, hit next, leave “Microsoft
Windows Server”, hit next, Leave it on “This server”, hit populate.
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Select your USB Drive. (A:\ in my case).
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Select the path you want to back up to. (A:\Veeam) in my case.
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Uncheck Enable vPower NFS, Next, Next, Finish.
Now, set up your offsite job.
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Go to Backup & Replication, Jobs, Backup.
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Right Click, Backup. Name the job whatever you want, click next. (I called mine Offsite)
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Add the VMs you want to back up. NOTE- you can remove certain ‘disks’ if you
don’t need them to be offsite. I have
giant 4 TB drives, but if I didn’t, I might need to remove the C: drive of my
file server for example… Do this by
clicking on Exclusions, Disks, Edit. Hit
Next.
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Select your Offsite backup repository, change “Restore
points to keep on disk” to 1.
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Click Advanced, set backup mode to
Incremental. (NOT reversed incremental).
Make sure “enable synthetic fulls” is UNchecked. Check the box under “Active Full Backup” that
says “Perform Active Full Backups periodically.
Set the Weekly on selected days to the day of your offsite, Saturday in
my case. Hit OK, then Next.
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Leave Image Processing and file system indexing
unchecked.
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Schedule your job to run on the day you want, in
my case every Saturday night at 10:00 PM.
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Hit Next, then Finish.
Last but not least, your jobs are going to fill up your hard
drive and stop working. You need to
create a batch file to clean this up. I
made a folder on C:\ called DiskCleanup, then made a batch file with this in
it-
forfiles -p "A:\Veeam\Offsite
Job" -s -m *.* /D -45 /C "cmd /c del @path"
This file will delete backups over 45 days old, which leave
me TWO fulls on each drive. You might
need to change the days to less if you only want it to keep one. Then, make a scheduled task to run your batch
file every week.