use case help

[greavette]

Hello,

I've recently discovered zbackup and I'm wondering if it will help me for our remote offsite backup.

I have servers in two different cities and I have access to both servers.  I'd like to provide offsite backup to our virtual machine backup's (Proxmox) to the second location using deduplication.  I know I could copy the entire VM backups but even in their zipped/compressed form they can be between 20GB to 50GB large.  My hope is to use a system over WAN whereby only the blocks that change will be backed up each day.  I know I'm short on specifics but I'm hoping that zbackup has these capabilities I'm looking for.

Does it sound like zbackup will be able to do the job for us?  If so I will dig further into investigating zbackup and begin testing.

Thank you in advance for any assistance you can provide me in my quest to find a fast offsite backup solution.

[Drew Douglas]

Hi greavette,

You can use zbackup for deduplication of backed up data prior to transmitting the bits to be stored offsite (presumably using rsync or such). However, I have only tested a setup where you also have a backup locally. 

There was a thread about it a while back, I believe:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/zbackup/remote%7Csort:relevance/zbackup/KgGPOWcBD58/aA8LhRmoqfoJ

[greavette]

Hello Drew and thanks very much for this reply.

The way I was thinking of using zbackup was to install it at Location A (primary) and use it for backing up all my VM's locally first (using dedupe) on a schedule.  So I would have a local backup like you've tested as well.  

I'm assuming that Location B will need an inital copy of all my Location A zbackup files.  I'm thinking of putting this onto removable media and sending it via courier for the initial setup.  But I'm unclear what I need to be running at my remote location B?  Do I need a server with zbackup installed there as well?  I do have access to build servers there if need be.  Or is it just a fileshare?  Ideally I would like to have the ability to be able to send data back to my Location A if disaster struck, but then again if I lost all my data that copy back to Location A would take again a very long time.  

Also, how does rsync know to move the block level bits that changed between Location A and Location B?  I've read through the link you've attached but I must admit I don't know rsync well enough to understand how only changed deduped data can transfer over WAN from Location A to Location B thereby speeding up my backup data?  

Thank you.