Veeam Agent for Linux Beta, Part 2: Let’s back up

Read the full series:

Ch.1 — Installation
Ch.2 — How to back up
Ch.3 — How to restore
Ch.4 — Command line

In the previous post of this short series, we announced the immediate availability of Veeam Agent for Linux and gave everyone a few quick tips on how to start using it. The installed command line has some nice inline help that’s easy to follow, but we decided to give you even more information with this short blog series. Today, we’ll talk about backups!

Let’s back up

Now that the software is installed, let’s see how quick and easy is to set it up and run our first backup. For those that use Linux but are not “hardcore” shell users, Veeam Agent for Linux offers, together with the main command line tool, a nice graphical user interface (GUI) that can be started and executed from the command line so that it can be used even on server-grade installations with no window manager. In order to open the interface, you just need to execute:

veeam

This will start the GUI, and a welcome message with a wizard will appear:

Veeam Agent for Linux Beta

First, we configure a new backup job, by hitting C. Following the wizard, we give the job a name and we choose if we want to back up the entire machine, or just one of the available volumes or files and folders:

Veeam Agent for Linux Beta

Then, we select a repository to be used as a target. Wait, we don’t have a repository yet! That’s why the wizard asks us to create a new repository. In my test machine, I’ve selected a shared folder, which in my case is a mapped NFS share coming from another server as my destination folder:

Veeam Agent for Linux Beta

In the following step, I can configure the schedule of the job. Once the job is configured and ready to be saved, the wizard offers to start the job immediately. I can also go back to the start screen and start the backup here by hitting S. Or I can start it later, as suggested by the wizard summary screen, by using the command:

veeam job start --name "BackupJob1"

If I hit Enter and open the details of the job, the interface shows me the job progress:

Veeam Agent for Linux Beta

In this case, the backup is completed successfully in just a few minutes:

Veeam Agent for Linux Beta

…and I can see the backup file safely stored in my NFS Server:

Veeam Agent for Linux Beta

With that 3.3 GB backup file, I can start a file-level or volume-level restore, or even a complete bare-metal recovery of my Linux server.

That’s something for the next blog post, so stay tuned!

See also

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