Backup copy job not working as it should for me

[kingsize]

Hi,

I am setting this topic up so other people/users and forum staff/developers can have their talk as well and maybe I can find another way for my backup copy job, because right now backup copy job is not working like it should for me.

I have a backup to my NAS. Retention policy 14. Everything is working perfectly. Now I am doing a backup copy job, that is going to the external hard disk connected to the NAS. Those are rotated drives.(Why? The manager can take it with him to home, in case something happens in the building). I did set it up as a rotated drive in the settings panel of the infrastructure.

My External hard disk is 3TB. I have 2 of them. 3 VM's of 750GB each. Total is 2250GB. Now A backup copy job should make a Full backup on the external harddisk and then it will make an incremental with synthetic backup. That would fit nicely on my 3TB external hard drive. The issue is, it is making a new full backup. 2250+2250GB = More then 3GB. (Yes is know that Veeam does a good job at compression but I did put roughly easy figures). I have set up 2 retention policy for the backup copy job. So 1 Full and 1 Incremental. That's it.

Summary about my Backup Copy Job setup:
- 1 NAS
- 2 External rotated drives, each 3TB
- 3 VM's, each size is 750GB, total is 2250GB
- Retention policy: 2

I am open to any ideas and I hope we can come up with a great solution that I would benefit and all other users that would love to set it up just like me. Thank you.

[veremin]

Backup copy job seems to be working as expected. If it doesn't find a base .vbk file on the rotated drive attached, it will re-create it from scratch. Otherwise, incremental cycle wouldn't be possible, as there is no full point to create an incremental one to. Thanks.

[kingsize]

Can you explain to me then why it is creating 2 vbk files? It should only do 1, just like you said. Is it because I right clicked on the job and selected active full manually?

[veremin]

Correct, that's the reason. Running active full backup manually will result in a new full backup. That's exactly what happened in your case.

By the way, enable "backed up by rotating drives" check box in the settings of your repository. This way, a backup copy job will create a new full backup, when it doesn't find a base .vbk. Otherwise (with the said check box disabled) it will fail.

[foggy]

You can configure automatic deletion of the previous full backup, if required.

[kingsize]

Sorry for the late reply, I didn't get a notification in my email.

Well it's still not working fine, backup copy jobs are failing. I have removed all files on the storage device. It keeps making multiple full backups.
This is the only issue I am facing with Veeam and I am not happy with it.

Thanks for the post, if I make those registry changes, it will work fine?

[foggy]

How the target repository is added to Veeam B&R? is it a CIFS repository by any chance? In this case second full on rotated drive is expected. If you configure registry value to cleanup the drive before the job, you'd achieve what you're after.

[kingsize]

Yes it is CIFS. Backup copy is going to the usb that is attached to the NAS. What if I make a normal backup and not a backup copy job. Will that work? Or is this a problem because it's CIFS?

[foggy]

Yes, it is because CIFS repository is used. Only Windows repository is able to maintain retention on rotated drives.

[kingsize]

This worked. Thanks @foggy. I hope one day that this will work with Veeam, because I do miss the incremental backup right now on my external harddisk!