Request Vimalin multiple target disks

[Sontec]

Hi Wil,
Recently some of our servers were infected.
For the most important servers we luckilly had Vimalin backups,
however I noticed that restoring e.g. a 500GB and a 900GB virtual machine
from normal harddisk takes a long time

Nowadays my VMs are running from NVMe RAID with a Vimalin backup to a big harddisk.

Would you consider extending Vimalin with a way to backup/restore from a fast disk?

I would like Vimalin to first backup to a fast disk e.g. NvME or SSD and afterwards copy it to a "slow" HDD.
I could then add a 4TB disk as go between, so Vimalin would backup faster.
Preferable the fast between disk would keep the last x backups (next to them being on the big harddisk).
This way backup would be fast, but more important if I want to restore a recent backup,
it would be faster than the 100-150MB/s I recently experienced

[wila]

Hi Sontec,

Not sure I am understanding your request correctly.
You can have multiple backup targets right now.
Each backup schedule that you setup can have its own backup target assigned.

--
Wil

[Sontec]

My setup is now as following:

1. bootdisk Windows Pro 10/11
   
2. 2x Nvme in RAID 1/Mirror.
   
3. 10 TB harddisk SATA III 7200rpm
   

My VMs run on the NVMe Raid disk.

Vimalin backups the VMs to the 10 TB "normal" disk.
E.g. the backup to the harddisk takes 120 minutes.

If I add another 4TB SSD (2,5") to my setup, the Vimalin backup might take +/- 30 minutes.
This will have less impact on my system and restoring a backup will also be about 90 minutes faster.

However maximum SSD sizes right now is 8TB (and € 1000) or anout € 300 for a 4 TB SSD.
So instead of replacing my 10 TB harddisk, I rather have the backup done to the fast SSD and later on replicated to the harddisk.

Now if I need the restore of a recent backup (e.g. the last 4 backups), I could just restore from the SSD.
If I need an older backup, I have to restore it from the slower harddisk.

Does the above make more sense ?
If not, I could just call you to explain 

[wila]

Sure I get it.

Cloning the backup automatically to another disk target currently isn't supported.

There's a request outstanding to add scripting support. 
So that you can automatically run a script after the backup process completes.
Once that is implemented, it could be used for these type of things.

Sadly not there yet and atm we're in the middle of a data center move, so currently no time for adding anything like that.
Once things calm down again I can set some time apart to look at this.
--
Wil

[Sontec]

Hi Wil,
I could write my own script to copy the backup from Vimalin to another disk.



However, if I have set Vimalin to do weekly backups to the SSD with a max of 4 (due to storage restrains),
and copy those backup to a harddisk with e.g. room for 10 historic backups, am I going to get in problem with Vimalins versioning folders?

Also how would I get Vimalin to acknowledge the backup at the other location,
so I could restore it from within Vimalin ?

Best regards,
Martijn.

[wila]

Hi Martijn,

You're getting a ahead of things now, the feature does not yet exist.

Vimalin can import backups, although I'm sure it will need some extra work to make this easier / more flexible.
Thanks for the suggestion.
--
Wil

[Sontec]

Hi Wil,

Programming my own workaround (until the featuure could/would be implemented),
I will need adhere to the Vimalin folder versioning.
Also not wanting to restore manually, I would have to find a way to add the "move/copied" backup to Vimalin.

I was just enumerating the problems I would encounter if I created my own move script.
Naturally, if in the future you would implement my feature request, you will probably have the same challenges