V8 Backup Jobs Not Starting

[tullyal]

Hi All,

We are currently V8 with a DD160 and have upgraded from V7.

Has anyone had problems running backup jobs where the scheduling is set to run after another backup job.

New backup jobs and cloned & modified jobs will not run since the upgrade.

Existing backup jobs created in V7 still continue to run after each other.

Anyone experiencing this?

Alan

[foggy]

Alan, what specific error messages do you get in your backup jobs that do not run? Have you contacted technical support already?

[tullyal]

Hi Foggy,

thanks for replying to my post.

We are currently running on an NFR license and I am testing the software to see how it works etc. so no support ticket.

There is no error message. The backup job does not start.

Job B is scheduled to start after A. I can run Job A by manually starting it and I would expect Job B to start after Job A completes but it doesn't.

I had a chain of jobs created in V7 that still works but new jobs created in V8 (after the upgrade) do not behave as per the schedule.

Regards,
Alan

[foggy]

We do provide support to those who has free/NFR licenses, based on staff availability though. So feel free to contact them, just respect the fact that they have a much increased number of requests due to the recent v8 release. Thanks!

[nefes]

Behavior of "After this" schedule have been changed since v7.
In v8 manual start of job A will not trigger job B to start. That was quite common request in v7.

[foggy]

Alan, can you confirm that you've tried to start the jobs chain only manually?

[cliffm]

Ah, I have the same issue.
Veeam "after this" backups will not run if I start a job manually.
Has this really been removed? I have built a whole system of weekend backups that write to a series of swapped drives. I always check that the correct drive is plugged in, then start the correct backup for that drive. After this a cascade of backups for that drive run "after this".

Thanks

[Gostev]

Yes, this was changed in v8 based on feedback - manual job runs no longer triggers chained job. Most users have considered this behavior to be a bug, because we are talking about an option of "Run the job automatically" control, which should not apply to manual job executions (as the name of the option implies). Thanks!

[cliffm]

Oh no! That is bad news. I rely on automatic backups after a manual start. How can I change this? Otherwise I am stuck in front of the computer for hours starting every job manually.

[foggy]

Cliff, what i the purpose of chaining jobs in your case? Why not just to start all of them and limit the number of concurrent tasks per proxy/repository to control the load?

[veremin]

How can I change this?

You might want to set automatic schedule, instead of manual, and set a pre-job script (for the first job in chain) to check whether or not the correct drive is inserted and let the job proceed or not in accordance.

Thanks.

[tullyal]

Hi All,

many thanks for all the feedback on my query.
Glad to find out that the "after this" backups don't trigger after a manual start is a 'feature' rather than a bug, and I can confirm looking at report emails that the jobs I had scheduled as "start after this" did indeed run when not using a manual start to the chain.

Thanks again.
Alan

[foggy]

Btw, here's a good reading about why job chaining is not considered as best practice, just FYI.

[cliffm]

You might want to set automatic schedule, instead of manual, and set a pre-job script (for the first job in chain) to check whether or not the correct drive is inserted and let the job proceed or not in accordance.

Thanks.

OK thanks. But I don't know how to do this. Is this a Veeam shell script? Any pointers?

Thanks

[nefes]

So if you need to start a chain of jobs, you could temporary schedule first one to run at current time plus several minutes, and disable (or adjust back) it's schedule after it have been started.
You could also write a simple script to do that for you in one click with powershell, if you need to perform that operation often.

[veremin]

Is this a Veeam shell script? Any pointers?

The pre-job activity is Veeam functionality, indeed. The script should use ordinary PS commands to check whether or not the correct drive is inserted. If you need an assistance with that, feel free to create a topic in the corresponding subforum. Thanks.

[cliffm]

So if you need to start a chain of jobs, you could temporary schedule first one to run at current time plus several minutes, and disable (or adjust back) it's schedule after it have been started.
You could also write a simple script to do that for you in one click with powershell, if you need to perform that operation often.

OK thanks, I worked it out.
I have a batch file that starts a powershell script. The batch file checks for the drive plugged in and then starts the script for the appropriate job.
Thanks

[cliffm]

Ah no that didn't work. A job chain does not progress if I start a job from a powershell script. Only the first job runs.

[foggy]

Ah no that didn't work. A job chain does not progress if I start a job from a powershell script. Only the first job runs.

You should not start the job chain form the script, but rather do as Vladimir has suggested above:

You might want to set automatic schedule, instead of manual, and set a pre-job script (for the first job in chain) to check whether or not the correct drive is inserted and let the job proceed or not in accordance.

[jcmachadouga]

We do have a lot of jobs that rely on the feature "RUN AFTER". This is not working after our upgrade to v8.

I have been told by Veeam Support that this is a known bug. Is there a patch available for this? Thanks.

[foggy]

Juan, please review the thread above, you're probably experiencing the same change in behavior: in v8 chained jobs do not run if the parent job is started manually. Could you please confirm whether this is the case for you?

[AJ83]

How can this be called a feature?

We rely on chaining for some filecopy jobs in which we run a powershell script to check if certain processes on other machines are ready, we then start a file copy job from this powershell script. Then we rely on a chained copyjob which copy`s a triggerfile to the target to give notice that the copy of files has finished. This whole proces is broken now since the chained job doesn`t start. Please provide a fix for this unwanted feature of not running chained jobs.

We use the power of Veeam for these copy`s because it is a copy from Linux to windows.

[jcmachadouga]

Juan, please review the thread above, you're probably experiencing the same change in behavior: in v8 chained jobs do not run if the parent job is started manually. Could you please confirm whether this is the case for you?

I am confused. This has been working fine until v8. Is this a bug or a change in a feature? According to Veeam support (Case ID# 00692626) this is a bug.

Please let me know. Since we have so many backups and no more than 24x7 hours a week, we have to rely on this feature.

Thanks.

[foggy]

This is not a bug, but an intentional change, please see Anton's post above for explanation. Thanks for the case ID, I will check the case for possible misunderstanding of this behavior.

[foggy]

We rely on chaining for some filecopy jobs in which we run a powershell script to check if certain processes on other machines are ready, we then start a file copy job from this powershell script. Then we rely on a chained copyjob which copy`s a triggerfile to the target to give notice that the copy of files has finished. This whole proces is broken now since the chained job doesn`t start. Please provide a fix for this unwanted feature of not running chained jobs.

Am I understanding you right, you have just a single chained job that should run after the parent job? Why not to trigger it directly from the script, when the parent job completes?

[AJ83]

That`s right, how would i do that?

I start the jobs with the following command in a powershell script:

Code: Select all

$job = Get-VBRJob | ?{$_.Name -eq $jobName}
Start-VBRJob -Job $job

The script is running out of user session.

[veremin]

Being converted to a .bat file the referenced script can be selected as a post-job activity of the parent job. Thanks.

[foggy]

File copy job does not have a post-job activity option, that's probably the reason for using chained job to monitor its completion in this case.

[veremin]

Then, two jobs might be executed within the mentioned script. Without additional parameters PS should process lines one by one, meaning that it wouldn't start child job, until the parent one is finished. Thanks.

[Philippe_Allard]

This is very sad, the way I see it, I upgraded to version 8 and lost a feature that was working perfectly fine and was doing what it said it was going to do… Start a job automatically after another job is finished. It doesn’t say anything about Scheduled or manually started job… it just started the job automatically after another one completed.

Completely changing this feature because some people complained about this behavior without considering that many of us think it was perfectly fine is definitely not the right way to address this problem. Veeam people should have added a checkbox next to this option saying ‘’ Also run if job is started manually’’ or something like that… This way everyone would be happy… ( Feature for a next release maybe ?? )

You changed it because some people saw the previous behavior as a bug… Now Ii is I who see the new one as a bug because the option clearly says to start a job automatically after another, except it doesn’t right now if I start the first one manually and it used to work just fine in version 7.