What is Veeam Backup & Replication?
Veeam Backup & Replication is a suite of tools that provide modern data protection and disaster recovery, offering:
- Secure immutable storage
- Reliable cloud backup options
- Continuous data protection
Veeam Backup & Replication allows you to create image-level backups of virtual, physical, and cloud data and also to restore them. You can do all this on a single platform with one portable licence for all workloads.
Veeam Backup & Replication optimises data transfer and resource consumption, allowing you to restore quickly and with minimal storage costs.
You can use Veeam Backup & Replication’s centralised console to administer backup, restore and replication operations. It also allows you to automate and schedule data protection operations.
What Are the Functions of Veeam Backup and Replication?
Veeam Backup & Replication provides a variety of ways to backup and restore data. Let’s look at the main functions performed by Veeam Backup & Replication.
- Backup. Veeam Backup & Replication allows you to create an image-level backup of virtual, physical and cloud machines. Image-level backups can be used for various types of recovery. For example, instant recovery, whole machine recovery, machine file recovery, etc.
- Restore. Using Veeam Backup & Replication, you can restore backup files to the original or new location. It offers several recovery types for different disaster recovery scenarios: Virtual Machine (VM) Recovery, Disk Recovery, Item Recovery and Safe Recovery.
- Replication. This technology allows you to create an exact copy of a virtual machine and synchronize it with the original virtual machine. Replicas of virtual machines are in a state of readiness to start, so replication provides the minimum target recovery time.
- Continuous Data Protection. This technology helps protect mission-critical VMware virtual machines when seconds or minutes of data loss are unacceptable. It allows you to reach your recovery point objective in seconds.
- Backup Copy. A backup allows you to create multiple instances of the same data in different locations. You can restore data from backup copies when you need it. The backup copy is used to create a successful data protection and recovery plan, as the primary backup may be destroyed along with the production data.
- Storage Systems Support. Veeam Backup & Replication allows you to backup virtual machines by taking snapshots of the storage volumes where the virtual machines reside. These snapshots can then be used as a backup data source.
- Tape Device Support. Veeam Backup & Replication offers support for tape devices and allows you to backup data to tape and restore it from tape as needed. Tape is one of the most widely used remote backup media. The main reasons for using tape are long-term archiving and compliance.
- Recovery Verification. This technology allows you to test backups and check whether data can be restored from them. You can check any backup restore point. During the scan, Veeam Backup & Replication scans the backup data for malware, boots the VM from the sandboxed backup, runs tests against the VM, shuts down the VM, and generates a report on the recovery test results.
What Can You Back Up and Restore Using Veeam Backup & Replication?
Veeam Backup & Replication allows you to restore the following objects:
- Virtual Machines. Veeam Backup & Replication creates image-level backups of virtual machines. It treats virtual machines as objects and not as a collection of files. The backup technology is typically used for VMs with lower recovery time objectives. If the primary VM fails, you will need some time to restore the VM data from the compressed and deduplicated backup file.
- Cloud VMs. Veeam Backup & Replication allows you to create and manage data backups and disaster recovery tasks for cloud VMs such as Seagate Lyve Cloud. You can perform the following operations: start and stop backup policies, monitor session statistics, view created snapshots and image-level backups, restore Lyve Cloud virtual machines, restore guest OS files and folders of Lyve Cloud instances, and export Lyve Cloud instance volumes as virtual disks.
- NAS File Share. With Veeam Backup & Replication, you can easily backup and restore your various NAS file shares. To do this, you need to configure the following components: file share, backup proxy, cache repository and storage repositories.
- Physical machines. For physical machines’ backups, Veeam Backup & Replication uses backup agents installed on a computer running on Windows, Linux or macOS operating systems.
How Do Seagate and Veeam Work Together to Back Data Up?
By itself, Veeam backup technology has data limitations (only 0.5 GB per block), which can dramatically increase costs if you are storing significant amounts of data or scaling as an enterprise operation. Veeam’s suite of backup and replication technology reduces the complexity of backing up vital data while Seagate Lyve Cloud offers greater scalability at a low cost alongside enhanced security features such as ransomware protection, multifactor authentication, and object immutability.
When combined, Seagate and Veeam offer an efficient disaster recovery solution for enterprises. Seagate follows global compliance to ensure data remains in line with international data privacy standards while keeping data readily accessible for recovery and business continuity.
Together, Seagate Lyve Cloud and Veeam Backup & Replication can save from 25%–80% of total spend on data storage and recovery within the first year.
How To Use Veeam Backup & Replication
How to Backup Using Veeam
To back up virtual machines using Veeam, you must first configure a backup job. The backup job determines how, where, and when to back up VM data. One job can be used to process one or more virtual machines. Jobs can be run manually or scheduled to run automatically at specific times.
To create a new backup task, use the New Backup Task Wizard. Specify the name and description of the job and select the virtual machine for which you want to backup. You can also exclude some objects from the backup, choose the order of the backup VMs, and specify additional settings. Finally, decide on a work schedule.
How to Configure Veeam Backup
You can configure Veeam Backup & Replication to automatically backup according to a schedule.
To schedule a configuration backup:
- Select the backup repository where you want to store the configuration backup. Then specify the number of restore points you want to maintain in the backup repository.
- Specify the schedule according to which the configuration backup should be created.
How to Move Veeam Backup Files to New Repository
To move the backup files to the new repository, copy them manually to the new repository. You need to include the metadata file (.vbm), full backup files (.vbk), and any additional files (.vib or .vrb).
Then, rescan the new repository and edit the backup task to list the new repository. If the backup job lists the new repository, then the mapping is complete.
How to restore a Veeam Backup
To restore the entire virtual machine to its original location, follow these steps:
In the inventory panel, select the Backups > Disk node. Deploy a backup job to the workspace, right-click on a virtual machine in the backup job, and select Restore Entire Virtual Machine to start the Full Restore Virtual Machine wizard.
Then, select the virtual machine and the restore point.
Veeam Backup & Replication will get the data blocks needed to roll back the VM to an earlier point in time and restore only those data blocks from the backup.
When secure recovery is enabled, Veeam Backup & Replication uses antivirus software to scan machine data before restoring the machine to production.
How to Restore Veeam Backup to Another Host
If you want to move Veeam Backup & Replication to another server, follow these steps:
- Stop running jobs and disable scheduled jobs.
- Save the registry keys that you have modified or created.
- Backup the Veeam Backup & Replication configuration database.
- Install Veeam Backup & Replication on the target machine.
- Restore the configuration database from a backup.
Use Seagate Lyve Cloud with Veeam Backup & Replication and enjoy the benefits of efficiently storing, managing, and securing large amounts of data.
