Forum ©XSIBackup: ©VMWare ©ESXi Backup Software

If your backup space is a bit more than your VM size, and your VMs are 4 and 8TB, then you are very limited by your factual constraints.

- [b]Onediff[/b]: differential, it just replicates VMs. This is not a backup method alone, as you will replicate any problem in your VM to the mirror VM.
- [b]XSIDiff[/b]: is just a binary OneDiff uses. When used on its own is a good way to move/ copy VMs from one server to another, but not a good backup method for 4 and 8TB VMs, maybe for small ones, depending on your available backup space.
- [b]XSITools[/b]: it's differential and it deduplicates data into its own repositories, which is the folder you will use as the [b]--backup-point[/b]. This is probably your best bet, as it combines deduplication with differential copy.

In your case XSITools is definetely your best option, but you still depend on that additional space, which may not suffice. Combine it with --backup-room=[available space], where [available space] is expressed in GB and see how many backups you can fit in your backup datastore.

[b]--backup-vms[/b] argument is exclusive to [b]--backup-type=custom[/b] as explained in the Man Page: [url=https://33hops.com/xsibackup-help-man-page.html](c)XSIBackup Classic Man Page[/url]

You are using [b][https://33hops.com/xsitools-vmfs-deduplication.html](c)XSITools[/url][/b] as the backup program. Use [b][https://33hops.com/xsibackup-help-man-page.html#prunexsitoolsrepo]--prune-xsitoolsrepo[/url][/b] instead of [b]--del-dirs[/b]. [b][https://33hops.com/xsitools-vmfs-deduplication.html](c)XSITools[/url][/b] does not generate backup folders as such, those folders only contain the hash-maps of your virtual disks.

[b][https://33hops.com/xsitools-vmfs-deduplication.html](c)XSITools[/url][/b] stores backups in deduplicated repositories, you may use [b][https://33hops.com/xsibackup-help-man-page.html#prunexsitoolsrepo]--prune-xsitoolsrepo[/url][/b] to delete individual backups manually, or the [b][https://33hops.com/xsibackup-help-man-page.html#backuproom]--backup-room[/url][/b] argument to let [b][https://33hops.com/xsitools-vmfs-deduplication.html](c)XSITools[/url][/b] manage the amount of space it uses.

Well, this message is clear:

Error RBAKSRV1: unable to determine the backup point location

There must be some error in your job syntax, we know nothing about it though.

You can achieve that in many different ways:

1 - Install NFS services in the Windows server and attach some volume to the ESXi server as a datastore.
2 - Buy some NAS device and install those two disks there. Then you can share the NAS volume both as NFS and SAMBA to be seen by the ESXi host as a datastore and the Windows machines as a CIFS (Samba) share.
3 - Install the Linux subsystem on the Windows server and target it through SSH from XSIBackup.

We'll check that

The restore module is a script itself, so it's indeed totally scriptable. We'll nevertheless will take this into account and supress the confirmation when used from a script. Nevertheless this is a controverted feature, so we'll add some type of command to remove the prompt for confirmation.

This is only a problem when some circumstances concur: having the need to restore a big number of VMs and using [b](c)XSITools[/b]. When you have some sort of regular backup, restoring is quite easy, as you have an Rsync binary inside the /bin folder.

You didn't say what type of backup you were restoring in any case.

XSIBackup provides the means to handle all this by using the [b][https://33hops.com/xsibackup-help-man-page.html#installcron]--install-cron[/url][/b] and [b][https://33hops.com/xsibackup-help-man-page.html#updatecron]--update-cron[/url][/b] arguments. We really don't know what you have been trying to do or why your cron wouldn't work.

Don't attribute human qualities to the OS, it can't want or like something, there isn't any malevolous spirit hanging around and keeping things from working. You can edit the cron just as long as you leave the file as it was before editing it, same permissions. Of course it's not persistent, that's why XSIBackup uses the --install-cron argument to move the cron logic to the init script.

Add [b]> /dev/null[/b] at the end of the cron line calling the XSIBackup job to redirect stdout to /dev/null and see if this helps.

0 2 * * * "/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/xsi-dir/jobs/001" > /dev/null # Added by XSIBackup

The crontab's default permissions are 1444:

Change them to 0700 to edit it with the root user

chmod 0700 /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root

And restore them back to 1444 afterwards, although leaving them as 0700 does not seem to be an issue on our test servers.

chmod 1444 /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root

Sorry, we had all the information in the backup job, our previous answer is not very precise, just generic.

That is an [b][https://33hops.com/xsitools-vmfs-deduplication.html](c)XSITools[/url][/b] repository, it's not a regular set of backup folders, but a deduplicated repository.
Timestamped folders do not contain actual data, but the hash maps to rebuild the virtual disks from the chunks stored in the data folder.
The [b]--date-dir[/b] argument is useless in this case, as [b][https://33hops.com/xsitools-vmfs-deduplication.html](c)XSITools[/url][/b] automatically creates one recovery point per backup.

The message in the e-mail report seems clear, it looks like you only have 454G available, but we would need the full output to have access to all details. Take on account that the process will remove the older folders at the end of the backup process. I know it sounds weird, but it's to prevent data loss in case the backup fails. So you will always need some extra room to maneuver, depending on the size of your VMs. Tweak the --backup-room to accomodate the number of backups you can fit.

We sent you the software by e-mail.

Best

Yes, XSIBACKUP-PRO license is per crontab, up to 20 hosts from one crontab.
This is regular systems administration of SSH service. Many services work over SSH nowadays and securing this protocol is part of every day system admin's tasks.

Just add a comma separated list of them