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Incremental backup every 15 minutes

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I have installed vmProtect 7 on a VMware host to backup 5 Windows virtual servers.
I saw that every incremental incremental need about 2 hours to finish (schedulled 1 incremental backup per day). If I try to schedul incremental backup every 15 minutes, vmProtect always need this about 2 hours to finish.
I tested too StorageCraft ShadowProtect on the same 5 Windows virtual servers and I can make an incremental backup every 15 minutes, taking effective backup time only about 40 seconds for all 5 servers.
I've configured vmProtect with CBT and Deduplication.
What can I do to backup incrementally also every 15 minutes with vmProtect?

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You are using the wrong tool if you need incremental backups every 15 minutes - this is more the domain of replication and/or high availability solutions.
The amount of time an incremental takes to finish (obviously) depends on what was changed since the last backup. If you can do an incremental backup of 5 servers in 40 seconds, then they must be virtually inactive.
I don't think you are going to achieve this on loaded servers.

Although if a daily backup takes 2 hours, I would have thought a 15 minute incremental backup would be a lot quicker - exactly how large is the backup in each case?

This is what I want to know, if vmProtect is the wrong tool. If i have a every 15 minutes incremental backup, I only can loose a maximum 15 minutes of work in case of disaster. If I have a only one dialy incremental backup, I can loose a maximum of 1 day of work.
Absolutly not, this 5 servers are very active, Sage Murano with MSSQL, MasterASP with MySQL, Mdaemon, Sulcus Squirrel with MSSQL, ...
I'm comparing it with ShadowProtect from StorageCraft. Have you test it?
Time Machine, on Macs, also make copies every 15 minutes.
Making backups once a day, every server need about 1GB~1,5GB, from vmProtect.

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Posts: 22
Comments: 3800

Hi Mario,

In your case 2 hours seem to be too long time to complete the incremental backup assuming only 1-1.5GB of daily changes, so here we need to investigate this issue separately by getting the log file from that incremental backup operation. Normally it should take much less time (and fit into 15 minutes period). The log file would give us more clues on what's going wrong.

Thank you.
--
Best regards,
Vasily
Acronis vmProtect Program Manager

Hey Mario,

Bunch of questions:
Are you doing these backups as one job or multiple jobs?

What is the servers doing? DB, file, ??

What's the target of the backup? What disks are in it? Online or LAN to a NAS, another server or...?

What are the local disks in the server?

If you're looking for shorter recovery windows, you may want to set it up as a replication job rather than as a backup job. At least then you can just boot the VM rather than 'restoring'.

Vasily wrote:

Hi Mario,

In your case 2 hours seem to be too long time to complete the incremental backup assuming only 1-1.5GB of daily changes, so here we need to investigate this issue separately by getting the log file from that incremental backup operation. Normally it should take much less time (and fit into 15 minutes period). The log file would give us more clues on what's going wrong.

Hi Vasily,

we are facing similar issues:

Full backup takes 10 hours (which is ok - We are backing up about 4TB).

Each incremental backup takes again 10 hours.

The backup itself takes about 1 hour, but the verification takes 9 hours. I understand that when performing the full backup, it will need to verify the entire data, but why does AVP verify the entire data when doing an incremental backup?

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Posts: 22
Comments: 3800

Hi ece,

The verification process is validating the particular recovery point for consistency. This means that program verifies the ability to recover from particular recovery point and this analysis implies that the whole amount of data necessary for recovery must be checked. In other words the validation will always take the same time as for full backup, since otherwise it's not possible to ensure that particular recovery point is good for recovery (in case we don't validate the full base parts, there cannot be guarantees that validating just incremental parts of the backup is good enough).

Thank you.
--
Best regards,
Vasily
Acronis vmProtect Program Manager

Hi Vasily,

thanks for the Info. PErsonaly I think it should be sufficient to check the incremential data, or at least at this as an option.

To overcome this "limitation" we have setup two tasks:

1. Task 1 does a "full" backup with validation on Saturday (it's not an actual "full" backup, because we are using the new Acronis backup format, but it is full in terms von validation).

2. Task 2 does an "incremential" backup with no validation on Mo/Tu/We/Th/Fr, because the over all process would take 12hours with validation. We don't want any backup related tasks to be performed during working/daytime.

Both tasks write to the same archive file.

This seems to work, but we are experiencing one oddity:

Task 1 inital run took about 24 hours. Any subseqential run takes about 12 hours, which is as expected. Task 2 takes 2 hours on Tu/We/Th/Fr, but takes 12 hours on Mo.

In other words: If Taks 1 ran the last time, then Task 2 takes 7 hours (unexpected). If Task 2 ran the last time, then Task 2 takes 2 hours (as expected). Any idea why this is happening?

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Posts: 22
Comments: 3800

Hi ece,

Normally it is not recommended to run 2 tasks writing data into the same archive, but still it is acceptable as long as 2 tasks are not running at the same time. Most likely the backup time increase is happening when Task 2 runs for the 1st time right after Task 1 had been run. Task 2 keeps CBT record track from its last run and it does not "know" about the new CBT record generated by Task 1 on Sunday. That's why it reads through all the data instead of using just the sectors returned by CBT. We will check it on our side, but most likely this would be a by design behavior.

Edit: my mistake: the CBT should be kept within the archive, so it should not be a "by design" behavior. We will check it with our QA team and I will update the thread.

Thank you.
--
Best regards,
Vasily
Acronis vmProtect Program Manager

Hi Vasily,

thank you for the feedback. If you need any further information, please send me a PM.

Cheers.

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Posts: 22
Comments: 3800

Hi ece,

So far we were unable to reproduce the behavior in our QA lab - we've also created 2 tasks and ran the 1st task several times, then ran the 2nd task. The time of the 2nd task is always equal to normal incremental run no matter which agent we use (Virtual Appliance or Windows Agent), so the behavior was actually normal one (tried both 8184 build and latest build of vmProtect 9). Looks like we'll need to investigate this issue further. Can you please open a support ticket and send us the full operation logs from 1st and 2nd task execution attempts, so that we can check what went wrong there?

Thank you.
--
Best regards,
Vasily
Acronis vmProtect Program Manager

Hi Vasily,

thanks for trying to reproduce the issue. I am not experiencing this issue anymore so I assume that when the 2nd task runs for the very first time ever, then it will need almost the full time. After that, every other time it will only take the time it needs for a incremental update. Can you confirm that this is the case?

Cheers

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Posts: 22
Comments: 3800

Hi ece,

Thank you for the notes. Yes, that could be the case + for example the backup could be going first without CBT and then it had been enabled in the properties of the VM.

Thank you.
--
Best regards,
Vasily
Acronis vmProtect Program Manager

I think this is acceptable and that no further inspection is needed in this case. :)

Thanks again for the prompt help!