Secondary backup to rotating HD

[simcfc73]

Hi,

I'm a little confused when it comes to external hard drive backup. I've come from DPM to VEEAM and it seems pretty good but the way to backup to a secondary target seems a bit messy.

So I have a few jobs, critical servers daily..non critical weekly...SQL hourly and a couple of clients on a daily basis. I create a backup job with all these on rotating disks.

Problem is how do I know which rotating disk holds the restore point on a backup, there doesn't seem to be a way to identify them.

Also, I keep getting 03/02/2020 21:23:29 :: Cannot connect to target backup repository. which I think is when the server is not logged in. Is this right? It is Bilockered so wasnt sure if this had something to do with it also.

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums.

Normally you don't need to know about "where is the restore point". The software knows it. If the USB drive is connected correctly, then it will create a new full backup and incremental backups accordingly.

Please see the rotated drives section in the user guide (drive detection and how it works). Also you can identify the restore points by name / date.

@Bitlocker: you need to make sure, that it is transparent for Veeam (or just use built-in encryption and don't use bitlocker at all)

Best regards,
Hannes

[simcfc73]

So this bit

When you specify retention settings for a backup copy job targeted at a backup repository with rotated drives, you must define the number of restore points per drive. For example, if you set retention to 7, the job will keep 7 restore points on every drive in the set.

So if I set it as 26 every drive will try and save 26 restore points?

I must be missing something as that means its not a rotating tape pattern if every tape holds the whole restore point map.

[HannesK]

I'm not sure about your question. Exactly that scenario just with 14 restore points is described in the link I posted earlier

For example, if you set retention to 14, the job will keep the total of 14 restore points across all drives.

Whatever tape handling (of other software vendors) does, is not relevant for the implementation of the "rotated drives" feature.