This is part 4 of a 5 series post on VEEAM installation and configuration. In this section, I will show how to create the backup policies.
Read my other posts on this topic:-
1. On the menu bar click on the Backup icon. In the new window that opens up, enter the name of the backup job and click next.
2. In the next window, click on Add and then select the VMs that you want to backup. You can also exclude certain drive(s) that you do not want to backup.
3. In the next window, you can specify a particular backup proxy server to use or you can let VEEAM automatically choose any suitable backup proxy server for you.
4. In the next screen, select the VEEAM repository that you want to use to store the backups. Also specify the number of restore points you want to keep on the disk.
VEEAM will automatically delete any old backup copy after the "14th" copy (as per the screenshot above). But it will make sure that there is always a FULL backup and related incremental backup copies on disk before it deletes any old backup file.
5. Click Advanced.
Here you can specify if you need synthetic Full Backups (which always run incremental and then in the background a FULL backup is created on the disk). In this case, you would have a FULL Backup file and some incrementals. For e.g. you can specify Saturday to convert your incrementals into a FULL Backup. The backups for the week will run incremental so you can see incremental files in the backup repository. Then on Saturday, a FULL Backup file will be created on the disk where your incremental backups are stored.
You can also check the roll back option, which is basically keeping the latest backup as FULL instead of incremental. So at any point of time, you would have a latest FULL Backup and past incrementals upto the point of FULL.
Under Advanced settings, you can also specify the deduplication level.
In the notification tab, you can enable email and SNMP settings.
In the vSphere tab, you can set the option for Changed block tracking which will allow for faster restores.
NOTE: You will see warning messages during your VM backup if the changed block tracking is enabled and the VM has an active snapshot.
Under the Advanced tab, you can enable settings for Integrity checks, VM retention etc. You can leave these settings to default.
NOTE: VM retention refers to the retention for any information, logs or any data for a VM that has been deleted and not the actual VM backup files retention.
6. Under Guest Processing, you can enable options for application level snapshots or application quiescence. You can also set option for the guest file system indexing. Both these options are self explanatory in the window so I won't spend much time discuss them here. If you have any questions, then please leave a comment at the bottom of the page.
7. In the next Window, you specify the schedule for the backup policy and the failed job retry settings.
8. Click create. Verify the policy details in the next window and hit finish to complete the backup job creation. You can also enable the backup job to run for the first time from this screen.
This completes the VEEAM Backup job creation steps. In my next blog, I will discuss regarding any performance issue that you may face if you install VEEAM on a virtual machine.
Click here to go to Part 5 (VEEAM Troubleshooting performance issues)
