## Create Backup Task

To back up VMs, you must configure a backup task, which defines how, where, and when to back up VM data. One backup task can be used to process one VM or more. You can configure a backup task and start it immediately or save the task and run it later. This section will guide you through how to create backup tasks step by step.

Contents

1. Before You Start
2. Launch the Backup Wizard
3. Backup Wizard: Choose Your Backup Destination and VMs
4. Backup Wizard: Configure Task Settings
5. Backup Wizard: Set Up Backup Schedule
6. Backup Wizard: Set Up Retention Policy
7. Backup Wizard: Configure Privilege Settings
8. Backup Wizard: Apply and Backup

### Before You Start

Before you start, please check if there are existing VMs. If not, please follow the following steps to add the vCenter Server or vSphere Hypervisor (ESX / ESXi) to have VMs available.

1. Click Manage VMware vSphere > Add to connect to VMware vSphere.
2. Fill in the server address and account information to connect to VMware vSphere.

Note:The storage space of the backup destination and the volume where the package is installed has to be at least 8G to perform backup tasks.

Apart from adding VMware vSphere, you can also edit / delete the vCenter Server or vSphere Hypervisor (ESX / ESXi) in Manage VMware vSphere:

- Edit: Select existing servers and change the account names and passwords.
- Delete: Delete servers that are not needed. If there are protected VMs in current backup tasks, you need to delete those tasks in order to delete the servers.

### Launch the Backup Wizard

You can do any of the following to launch the backup wizard:
- Go to Active Backup for Business > Virtual Machine > Virtual Machine, single select or shift / ctrl + left click to multi-select the virtual machine you want to back up, and click Create Task to launch the backup wizard.
- Go to Active Backup for Business > Virtual Machine > Virtual Machine, and click Create Task to open the backup wizard.
- Go to Active Backup for Business > Virtual Machine > Task, and click Create to launch the backup wizard.

### Backup Wizard: Choose Your Backup Destination and VMs

After the backup wizard is opened, select a shared folder which is in the Btrfs file system as the backup destination, specify a name for the backup task, and select virtual machines for this backup task.

#### Note:

For users who have already done the selection in the virtual machine view, the selected VMs will be automatically displayed on the page.

### Backup Wizard: Configure Task Settings

- Maximum quantity of concurrent backup device(s):Configure the number of concurrent backed up devices. The maximum number of backed up virtual machines is 10.
- Enable VMware Changed Block Tracking: Enable VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) to only transfer blocks that have changed since the last backup and greatly reduce the transferred data size.
- Enable Application-aware Backup: Perform application-aware backup to ensure application data is consistent. Please note that this feature leverages VMware Tools and Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to ensure the consistency of backup data for Linux and Windows VMs and therefore requires the latest version of VMware Tools to be installed and Windows VMs supporting VSS.
- Enable Data Transfer Compression: Compress the source data to reduce the transferred data size and significantly reduce the used storage space.
- Enable source datastore usage detection: Since taking snapshot may require additional space on the host datastore, insufficient space on the datastore may cause the virtual machine to suspend automatically and lose data. By enabling this feature, the backup job will fail when the host datastore is lower than the certain percentage you have set.
- Enable backup verification: Enable backup verification to enhance backup reliability. By using Synology Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) to boot up a backed up device and shoot a video, users can make sure that the backup file can be properly executed.
- Take livevideo for … sec.: Specify the duration for your video, which will start shooting once Synology Virtual Machine Manager begins running the backup image. The video will be played at 3x speed.
- Advanced settings: Set up the script and credential for individual VMs.
  - Select single virtual machine or shift + left click to multi-select virtual machines to specify script / credentials setting for VMs.
  - Click Script to browse the script executed in the guest OS and specify the script processing mode.
    - Required successful processing: VM backup process will stop if the script failed to be executed.
    - Ignore script execution failure and continue the VM backup: VM backup process will continue even if the script failed to be executed.
  - Click credential to specify the username and password for individual VM.

#### Note:

1. By setting up the script and enabling the VM script execution, the credential of VM is required. An error message will be displayed if the credential is missing.
2. VMware Tool is required to be installed to execute pre-post script.
3. For free ESXi, CBT is required to be manually enabled.
4. Synology Virtual Machine Manager is required to be installed to enable backup verification

### Backup wizard: Set Up Backup Schedule

You may set up the backup schedule based on your backup policy.
- Manual Backup: Backup task will only be performed upon manually click Backup. No scheduled backup will be performed.
- Scheduled Backup: Set the backup task to be performed on an hourly, daily or weekly basis. Click on the drop-down menu to check the days of the week you wish the task to be carried out.

### Backup Wizard: Set Up Retention Policy

To strike the balance between Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and storage efficiency, you may set up your own retention policy to meet your business needs.

- Keep all versions: All backed up versions will be retained and will not be rotated if this option is enabled.
- Apply the following methods: You may choose how many days, weeks, months or years of versions will be kept. Different retention policies can be set up to customize your own retention policy.

For example, if you want to keep all versions for the first 30 days and the latest version of each day for the second 30 days . You should insert 30 days for Keep all versions for how many days and insert 30 days for Keep the last one version of the day for how many days.

### Backup Wizard: Configure Privilege Settings

Privilege settings is configurable when creating the backup task. To ensure only eligible users can have access to restore backed-up files and versions of the backup task, privilege settings can be configured during task creation. You can always edit the task to change the privilege settings.

Check the user/group that can browse and restore backed-up versions of the task.

Administrators group/users are default eligible to restore the backup task.

### Backup Wizard: Apply and Backup

After configuring all the backup settings, a backup summary will be displayed. Please follow the instructions below to finalize the backup after confirming your settings:

1. Click Apply to create the backup task and a pop-up window will appear.
2. Click Yes if you would like to run the backup immediately, or you may click Backup on the task list if you want to run the task afterwards.