Backup Question

[larry]

I have a group of VMs – this group is 650 Gig, it takes 12 hours to do the full backup over my WAN. I want a full backup every Sunday starting at 8am, I want the CB backups every night starting at 9pm. Can I make one job for each task and will the CB task use the full if I store to same location ? Is there a way to copy a job and edit to create the second piece ? Is there a way to just tell the job a different start time when a full is done ?

Second question
When doing backup jobs and keeping 7 copies with a full once a week is there 2 full copies at any time. My question is on disk space, do I need room for two full backups plus changes when doing the above.

[Gostev]

I have a group of VMs – this group is 650 Gig, it takes 12 hours to do the full backup over my WAN. I want a full backup every Sunday starting at 8am, I want the CB backups every night starting at 9pm. Can I make one job for each task and will the CB task use the full if I store to same location ? Is there a way to copy a job and edit to create the second piece ? Is there a way to just tell the job a different start time when a full is done ?

No, everything you suggest here is not possible. I suggest creating 2 Windows scheduled task to start the job from command line instead, one task for weekdays, and another one for Saturday.

When doing backup jobs and keeping 7 copies with a full once a week is there 2 full copies at any time. My question is on disk space, do I need room for two full backups plus changes when doing the above.

Correct, in this case there are 2 full backups on disk. Synthetic backup is best when used in forever incremental mode - but as soon as you choose to do periodic fulls, you no longer get storage space benefits that synthetic backup provides...

[larry]

I create a job to backup a VM. Under advance I select full back up on TUE. I use the command line to run job today, TUE, and it uses CB. How I can I run a job and tell it full on Tue but CB other days from the commandline ? I tried just click and starting the job in the UI but it still just does a CB run. I am tring to do "I suggest creating 2 Windows scheduled task to start the job from command line instead, one task for weekdays, and another one for Saturday." I just alway get a CB backup. I just cut and paste the commandline, is there some option I need to use ?

[Gostev]

OK, you are right, command line will always run incremental pass. I will check with devs tomorrow if there is a way to initiate full backup with PowerShell, and update this thread if there is solution.

[Gostev]

Hi Larry, apparently you can do this with PowerShell:

Code: Select all

Start-VBRJob JobName -FullBackup

[larry]

What I found that works is
First create dummy job : create a job called “Start Sun Full” to backup any vm ( just pick anyone ) , exclude everything, then I cut and pasted the command line for my real job to the post task of the dummy job. Edit the commadline to be like "C:\Program Files\Veeam\Backup and FastSCP\Veeam.Backup.Manager.exe" startfullbackupjob 0554ec28-3823-4ca6-82dd-5f3d91cc2fd7 test” the word test is the name of the job chaining to, the number comes for the cut above . Now my dummy jobs starts and ends but then it starts my real job at the new time and does a full backup. My Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager report shows that the job “Start Sun Full “ started. Just be sure to set retries to 0 on the dummy job. If a failure occurs starting the job it shows on my enterprise reports.

I scheduled daily job to run Mon – Sat at 7pm but start Sunday full backup at 7 am all inside the Veeam UI and job stats included in normal report.

This is another thing that chaining jobs would help with.

[Gostev]

Larry, how did you find about "startfullbackupjob" option? I avoided suggesting this one, because it is debug option that is unsupported for the reason that it does not execute jobs properly. Normally, all jobs are initiated, started and controlled by Veeam Backup and Replication service. But with this key, job is started "interactively" per say, outside this service. This in turn might be causing various artifacts. Just one example, logging off the user account which is used to start this command line would result in immediate abnormal job termination.

On the other hand, PowerShell command to initiate full backup I have provided above does not have this issue.

[larry]

When I right click a job and click perform full backup - this is what was sent to Veeam.Backup.Manager.exe. I just copied it. I was tring not to us powershell. When I have someone else managing the setup the fewer outside apps the better. It is not the writing of the ps1 it is the trouble shooting a year from now I don't waant. If you think the startfullbackupjob will break my system I will remove it. I just really want to do a full backup once a week.
If there was a full compare that checkedsumed the whole backup back to the live I would never feel the need to redo the full. It is not that I think Veeam will write wrong, it is that Windows might write wrong. After a bad write I may not know for months, if I then rsynced the bad write then both sites have bad data.

[Gostev]

No, it will not break your system, but you can find quite a few pre-v4 topics on this forum where customers are complaining how user logoffs terminate v3 jobs (in v3, jobs were not managed by the service either). While we addressed this with new job management in v4, when using this command line this potential issue is something you should keep in mind.

[larry]

I just tried and if you start the job by filling in the post command, it runs as in sevice space and not in user space. I am not opening a command box to run.When I start it this way the UI is all updated with job status and percent done.

[Gostev]

OK, I will check with the corresponding dev tomorrow if doing it this way removes the possible issue.

[larry]

Would this be the perfered way

This allows me to keep the scheduling and reporting inside the Veeam environment.

I found the way to use power script from inside Veeam. Under the post task I use the line

"C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" c:\temp\test.ps1

Content of test.ps1 just 6 lines

Add-PSSnapin VeeamPSSnapin
Get-PSSnapin

Start-VBRJob1 test1 –FullBackup
Start-VBRJob2 test2 –FullBackup
Start-VBRJob3 test3 –FullBackup
Start-VBRJob4 "Ser Type G1"

I configure job “test1” to run mon – sat at 7 pm with CB. Then I have my dummy job run Sunday Morning at 6am, in the dummy job post task I place the line above. Now I get a full backup on Sunday AM and CB Mon – Sat at 7pm.

I tested with users logged in as well as no one logged in.


This would be a great feature, a text box with on job success run the powerscript code ( without me saving a file ). Have the box add the snapin stuff so the user would add one line to do some commands. Now I have total control without leaving Veeam Manager. A second text box with run after last retry but still fail would make it complete. This would be better than chaining.

If you allowed to create a job with no VM to backup would make this cleaner.

[larry]

Gostev is running a ps1 this way Ok ?

[Gostev]

Sure, this looks good to me.