Unexpected broken backup chain

[NetBSS]

Hello,

(We opened case 04128417 for this, but it was closed due to support team load.)

We are using VBR 9.5.4 Community Edition to backup 4 Windows guests on an ESXi 6.5 host. Backups are to USB disks shared off a Windows PC, 1 job and disk/repository per day of the week, using a reverse incremental scheme. So each disk/repository gets used once a week, every week.

This mostly has been working fine, but one of the Friday backup suddenly started a new backup chain, with no explanation logged.

• The previous week had been missed, as the disk hadn't been available. (But this has happened before and has not affected subsequent backups.)
• The week before that had run normally and successfully.

The broken backup chain has a significant effect on retention, since a full backup fills about 25% of the destination disk.

We have had two broken backup chains before this, on different disks, but in those cases the reason was somewhat more clear, e.g., immediately cancelling the previous backup (we won't do that again...)

How can we determine what caused this break in the backup chain, so we can avoid it in the future?

Thanks,
John

[PetrM]

Hello,

Unfortunately, this is not something we will be able to troubleshoot over the forum posts. I'd recommend to re-open the case and to continue working with our support team in order to find the root cause for the issue.

Thanks!

[NetBSS]

Thanks for your reply, PetrM.

Is it possible to re-open a case with Community Edition?

Thanks,
John

[PetrM]

Hi John,

According to our support policy, technical support will be provided on a best-effort basis if you have Community Edition.

In your specific case, the behavior seems to be quite strange and should be investigated, may be we there would be a chance for some kind of optimizations at the level of our source code. Therefore, I've asked our support team to review the case and re-open it. Our support engineers will contact you soon and I guess that upgrade to the version 10 would be the first step.

Thanks!

[NetBSS]

Thanks! Hopefully this will lead to a resolution.

[foggy]

The reason for making a new full should be clear from the corresponding job session log - you can review it while you're waiting for the engineer's reply. One of the typical reasons is missing the previous file in the chain (meaning that it exists in the database but doesn't exist on disk).

[NetBSS]

So far no explanation found, though Veeam is still looking into it (and I do appreciate the Community Edition support.)