This is an archive version of the document. To get the most up-to-date information, see the current version.

About Backup Copy

With backup copy, you can create several instances of the same backup file and copy them to secondary (target) backup repositories for long-term storage. Target backup repositories can be located in the same site as the source backup repository or can be deployed off-site. The backup copy file has the same format as the primary backup, so you can restore necessary data directly from it in case of a disaster.

Veeam Backup & Replication supports backup copy for the following types of backups:

Backups of VMware vSphere or VMware vCloud Director virtual machines created with Veeam Backup & Replication
Backups of Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines created with Veeam Backup & Replication

Backups of virtual and physical machines created with Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows, Veeam Agent for Linux, Veeam Agent for Mac, Veeam Agent for Oracle Solaris or Veeam Agent for IBM AIX

Backups of Nutanix AHV virtual machines created with Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV
Backups of Oracle and SAP HANA databases created with Veeam Plug-ins for Enterprise Applications
Backups stored in an HPE StoreOnce backup repository

File share backups created with Veeam Backup & Replication

Backups of Amazon EC2 instances created with Veeam Backup for AWS
Backups of Microsoft Azure virtual machines created with Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure
Backups of VM instances created with Veeam Backup for Google Cloud
Backups created with Veeam Backup for RHV
[Starting from Veeam Backup & Replication cumulative patch P20211211 for v11a] Backups exported by K10 policies

Important

Mind the following for copying backups created with Veeam Backup for AWS, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure or Veeam Backup for Google Cloud:

You can copy such backups only if you have paid types of license. Veeam Backup Community Edition is not supported.
You can copy such backups from external repositories but not to them.
When copying backups from external repositories, mind that there can be a situation when new restore points were not copied. In this case, make sure the source chain for the backup copy job was not recreated. If it was recreated (all restore points have been deleted and created anew), you must create a new backup copy job with a new chain of backups.

When the backup copying process starts, Veeam Backup & Replication accesses backup files in the source backup repository, retrieves data blocks for a specific machine from the backup file, copies them to the target backup repository, and composes copied blocks into a backup file in the target backup repository. The backup copying process does not affect virtual and physical infrastructure resources, does not require creation of additional VM checkpoints or VSS snapshots and does not produce load on machines whose backups are copied.

Backup copy is a job-driven process. To copy backups, you need to configure backup copy jobs. The backup copy job defines when, what, how and where to copy. For more information on how to create backup copy jobs, see Creating Backup Copy Jobs for VMs and Physical Machines. Note that to copy file share backups, you need to configure a file share backup job, not the backup copy job. For more information, see Creating File Share Backup Jobs.