Offsite backups are no place for errors. Unfortunately, companies make simple offsite backup mistakes on a daily basis that impact their businesses in the long term. Knowing the guidelines of offsite backups will make a big difference in the safety of your data. This article will help you follow best practices so you can avoid common mistakes and end up finding out you were not properly protected. We will look at five best practices, discuss the consequences of the potential errors, and outline the solutions that could save your backups.
1. Size your data and plan ahead
You should know how much data you have and how this will change in the near future.
Your total amount of storage needed will be critical information when discussing your backup strategy with a Veeam Cloud and Service Provider (VCSP) such as Sherweb. More specifically, sizing your data and making forecasts is important to prevent failed backup jobs and under-provisioned repositories that result from inadequate memory resources.
To be ready to meet your VCSP and avoid unfortunate data loss, here are some suggestions:
- Use Veeam ONE – a monitoring and reporting tool. It will:
- Calculate the anticipated amount of changed blocks in the virtual machines (VM) based on their write rate data and provide data needed to plan ahead for resource allocation.
- Check the configuration of your virtual machines to see if they are prepared to perform backups.
- If you do not wish to invest your time in the previous suggestion, let Sherweb’s solutions architects estimate the storage required for your company.
- Plan for disaster recovery. Choose a VCSP that will store your data and can also restore your backup image in the cloud as a fully running VM (also known as a cold disaster recovery site). In case of a disaster, this setup means you won’t have to rush to move your data yourself and install it on a server. Sherweb provides free migration of backups to a Performance Cloud cold disaster recovery.
2. Let Veeam do the scheduling for you
You should let Veeam software do the backup scheduling for you. Tech administrators in companies tend to make the mistake of chaining the backup jobs one after another, which is not the best practice.
The problem with chaining backups is that if one backup fails, all of the proceeding backups will fail as well. In some cases, it may be necessary to chain backups. However, in the majority of cases, you should let Veeam do its job.
A bonus tip. If you are not fully confident about your backup scheduling strategy, contact Sherweb’s Veeam-certified technical support team. They are available 24/7/365 to advise you.
3. Verify your backups
Your VM backup needs to be tested and validated for recoverability every time. The last thing any business needs is to be surprised with an unrecoverable backup when it is most needed. Depending on the amount of backups you do, it may not be efficient to have an employee check the process each time.
To avoid having an administrator monitor every backup, you could get SureBackup – a Veeam technology that allows you to automatically complete the time-consuming tasks of testing and validating recoverability.
An additional solution is to contact Sherweb’s technical support team, who may advise you on how to perform and test your backups. Sherweb also offers its Performance Cloud resources in case you want to test the restoring process for your cloud backup.
Lastly, Sherweb offers full care for data stored in its Performance Cloud. Sherweb’s experts are there to monitor your data and ensure that the latest practices in security and safety are performed and constantly improved.
4. Finalize Instant VM Recovery
When you complete your Instant VM Recovery but do not migrate it, issues may occur. Instant VM Recovery will disturb your system because other processes like SureBackup, backup jobs and others can’t run while the restore point is blocked by the VM Recovery. If Instant VM Recovery is left untouched, it will result in the backup file increasing and consuming space on the Veeam Backup Server.
The solution is to migrate your Instant VM Recovery to the production environment. You can learn more about the Instant VM Recovery by reading this guide or simply by contacting Sherweb’s Veeam-certified technical support team. They’re available 24/7/365 to answer your questions about Instant VM Recovery.
5. Maintaining a high transmission rate
You should choose a VCSP that can transfer your backup into their storage quickly and safely.
WAN Acceleration will cut down your transfer time and bandwidth. It will also improve the reliability of TCP and permit long-running jobs to finish more consistently.
For a company to be certified for WAN Acceleration, it has to meet many requirements established by Veeam. That is why it is a feature offered by few Cloud Service Providers, including Sherweb. In addition to WAN Acceleration, Sherweb provides the fastest servers according to the latest benchmarking tests. Performance Cloud’s results speak for themselves.
You may still make some mistakes when backing up your data. However, you will avoid dealing with some of the big ones by sizing your data, letting Veeam schedule your backups, finalizing your instant VM recovery, and working with a VCSP that offers WAN acceleration. We hope these tips were useful and that you will choose to partner with Sherweb. You’ll get access to cloud backups on our amazing infrastructure, and get support from our industry-leading technical support team.
