Synthetic Full Silently Fails on Retry

[emilec]

I had a open ticket with support a while ago. Support thinks this is a feature request while I believe it's a bug. Anyway this is more of a vent / heads-up for the rest of you. My custom monitoring to detect this issue failed me and I'm sitting with 3 months of no weekly synthetic fulls <sigh>.

The problem is that if you have a job that runs on a day which is marked to create a synthetic full it will be marked as completed successfully when the retry runs even if the synthetic full was never created. There are two problems here:
1) The retry ignores the fact that the job required a synthetic full and doesn't retry it
2) The reporting doesn't see the failed synthetic full as a critical backup error.

Behold:


Nothing to see here move along...


Additionally: These backups specifically are being sent offsite. Due to the length of time it takes to complete a synthetic full, the requirement for Veeam to keep the connection open while the synthetic full takes place and Veeam's IMHO over sensitivity to connectivity problems I do on occasion have synthetic full jobs fail mid-way at other sites as well due to abritrary "connectivity" issues. Here too I queried support on being able to set the time-outs and sensitivity but was told this is hard-coded. Hopefully it's on the feature request list.

[Dima P.]

emilec,

Thank you for detailed explanation of your problem, but without case ID it is impossible to confirm your scenario. Is it possible to find the old case ID or at least some reference? Thank you.

[Vitaliy S.]

I agree with our support team that this can be considered as a feature request, so thanks for the heads up. As to your situation, have you considered building synthetic fulls locally to avoid connection drops and then use backup copy jobs that have a resume option to transfer your backups to the secondary location?

[emilec]

emilec,

Thank you for detailed explanation of your problem, but without case ID it is impossible to confirm your scenario. Is it possible to find the old case ID or at least some reference? Thank you.

Old Case: 00579353

One of my engineers also has a new case open for another customer site. I'll get the details from him on Thursday when he's back in the office.

I can open a case for this issue as well if you like?

[emilec]

I agree with our support team that this can be considered as a feature request, so thanks for the heads up. As to your situation, have you considered building synthetic fulls locally to avoid connection drops and then use backup copy jobs that have a resume option to transfer your backups to the secondary location?

We'll just have to disagree on that one. I can't see how either retrying or reporting correctly on a failed sythetic full is a feature request.

Copy jobs don't work for us unfortunately.

[Vitaliy S.]

We'll just have to disagree on that one. I can't see how either retrying or reporting correctly on a failed sythetic full is a feature request.

Actually I was referring to your entire post as a feature request, sorry for that misunderstanding. For some reason I assumed that you have discussed the entire solution with our support team, not just the reporting part.

2) The reporting doesn't see the failed synthetic full as a critical backup error.

What is the status of the backup job in this case? Just want to check how Veeam ONE treats this situation in our predefined report templates.

[emilec]

What is the status of the backup job in this case? Just want to check how Veeam ONE treats this situation in our predefined report templates.

Job will report as completed successfully. I suspect if you don't enable retries it will list as complete with errors.

[emilec]

Here is a new case where we are seeing the same problem with how synthetic full failures are reported. #00639231

[Vitaliy S.]

Thanks for the case ID, I will take a look at this as well.

[emilec]

Looks like this has been fixed in Veeam 8.

If the synthetic full fails the job status now correctly reports as failed. Additionally if you retry the job it actually retries the synthetic full.