Backup Copy Full & Incremental Incomplete

[Paulo Balau]

Hi All! Newby here
I’ve 9.5 Update 3a and I have a issue/doubt.

Backups Jobs (BJ) run at night, with Full ones on Weekend. and BackCopy (BC) are running daily.
BC has several VMs lasting more than 24hrs to copy, so we’ve restricted this BC to run only between 5:00 and 22:00.
The BC repository is a USB/SharedFolder/CIFS location.

On first BC run it gave an warning but after restarting it resumed the Full copy but when reaching the 22:00 issued an error (why an error if it was expected to pause?)
Meanwhile normal BJ ran normally (although very very slow).
On resuming the BC at 5am instead of resuming the full restore point it started adding an incremental.
So this is how I have things now:

VM1: Full (ok – day1)
VM2: Full (Incomplete – day1) + Incremental (ok – day 2)
VM3: Full (Incomplete – day1) + Incremental (Incomplete – day 2) + Incremental (ok – day 3)

Questions:
a) Should not veeam resume the fulls for VM2 & 3?
b) Of course I cannot recover VM2 for day1. But, for sure, may I entirely recover VM2 from day 2 on?
c) The same for VM3, cannot recover day1 & day2 but recover from day3 forward?

All the best
Paulo Balau

[foggy]

Hi Paulo, you need to extend the interval temporarily to let the job perform initial sync - now it just doesn't have enough time to do that. After that it will sync only incremental data, which would take less time. Now, when the allowed processing time ends, the job terminates and resumes transferring data when the next allowed slot opens. Even though it writes to another backup file, it still tries to copy all the missing blocks that it didn't copy before to build the restore point corresponding to the latest VM state.

[Paulo Balau]

Thanks Foggy,

I should not extend the initial copy because it will overlap with the normal backups jobs that need to be performed. Assuming, backup copy takes 36hrs to complete (for example) some daily backups will not run.
I prefer the copy to last one more day or two but have the backups jobs done. The interval is now 1 day with timeframe 5:00 to 22:00, because regular backups will start at 22:00.
As typically I'm using this for Offline/Offsite purposes. Next week I'll switch for another USB Disk; another copy job with similar settings.

My main concern is if the actual backups statuses are good/consistents or not. From your words I interpreted they are ok to be entirely restored. Am I rigth?

BR
Balau

[Paulo Balau]

Sorry, regarding the overlapping… unless you tell me that backup copies are suspended to allow regular bakups to be performed…

[foggy]

The first restore point that will have OK status will be restorable.

[foggy]

Sorry, regarding the overlapping… unless you tell me that backup copies are suspended to allow regular bakups to be performed…

In case of forward incremental mode used by the source backup job, they can overlap, since backup copy requires read-only access to the source files. In other cases the backup copy will be paused.