Rotated External Harddrive Unable to Safely Remove

[Caveman]

Hi
Support Case Number: 01763321

Current Setup:
Veam 8
Backup Job runs at 10:00 Monday - Friday
Backup Copy Jobs run after 0200 Monday - Sat
we have 5 different jobs for each day of the week (*please note these were setup before update 2*)

Issue:
a couple of days ago we had a failed report from our backup copy job stating that the hard drive is not ready. The harddrive was connected perfectly fine however the server that it was plugged into could not read it.

After a series of diagnostics on the hard drive it was the MBR partition table that had become corrupted and since it was under warranty we set it back to Western Digital. A couple of days later on another hard-drive the same happened again.
Now i know this could be put down to faulty hardware however, my colleague informed that he was unable to eject the drive safely on numerous occasions in the morning when he switched from one day to another. after doing alittle bit of investigation i found that it was Veeam that was holding the Hard drive and not allowing it to be safely removed.

what i would like to know is:
short of disabling the job every morning in order to eject the drive safely, which would stop the jobs from being automatous (continual) to manually operated. is there a way to keep the job continuous, and be allowed to safely remove the hard drive

[foggy]

Backup copy job shouldn't lock any files while it is idle.

[Caveman]

Hi Foggy,
I got a reply from my support ticket for other people that wish to know.

Thank you for contacting Veeam Technical Support! My name is Viktoriia and I'll handle your case opened with us.

This is an expected behavior in update 2, we implemented caching which increases RAM requirements for the target agent. If this is enabled, Backup Copy job target agent will hold a lock on target files even if the session is idle and, accordingly, you can't eject the drive.

To get rid of this issue please implement the following registry value:

AgentReadOnlyCache
Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 0

Implement it on each proxy or repository in your Veeam infrastructure here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication\ HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Veeam\

Restart Veeam Backup Service on Veeam server is obligatory.

I have changed that registry and was able to "safely remove" the hard drive without lockout. i will continue to monitor this.

[foggy]

Indeed, with cache mechanism enabled, the chain is kept locked for the time the job performs its activity. However, when everything is transferred, the files are released. Most likely, in your case the files were still locked due to the drive failure.