[Feature Request] Moving VM from one backup job to another

[Ollo]

Hello,

if a backup of a VM should be done newly from another backup job, you have to add it to the new job.
You have to delete the VM from the old job and have to wait, until your retention period expired and than delete it from disk.
At the new job a fullbackup was made at the first time and and a new copy will be done.

It should be possible to move a VM from one job to another without doing new backup

[Shestakov]

Hello,
Jobs may have different parameters, so you can't just start from incremental backup with the new job. The jobs may or may not have disks exclusion, application-aware processing etc. That's why full backup run is required.
Thanks for the request!

[foggy]

If both jobs point to a per-VM enabled repository, then "migrating" VM between jobs might be possible, but I don't think this was ever tested.

[squebel]

We've run into the need to be able to do this many times and there does not appear to be any way to do this?

Our current need to do this is we have a single vm that is over 10TB. We need to break it out of its current job and move it to another job but we can not re-ingest 10TB of what is essentially new data.

I would really like to know if there is truly a way to do this and if not, my curiosity wants to understand why it is not possible. This is in a per-vm backup chain on a SOBR with two ReFS extents.

[soncscy]

Heya squebel,

With this it shouldn't be an issue as long as the VM stays on the same volume -- if you move it from the ReFS volume it's on, then it's gonna rehydrate. I __think__ you can move it to a new folder on the same volume, but maybe test with a smaller VM first that you know is block cloned instead of accidentally rehydrating the 10 TB one.

But with block cloned backups aside, I know I've just copied the VBM + the necessary pervm files before, imported the vbm, and then mapped the backup without issues.