RDX/Rotating Media - Problem

[frey_klein]

Hello everyone,

little preface: up until last week we did our backups only to our NAS devices and that always made me nervous. At some point, I convinced the boss to get a RDX drive and cartridges. They work as intended and I can sleep better at night - awesome.

Since I have 2 x 5TB cartridges, I change them everyday and I take the "old" one home with me. VEEAM in its current configuration writes a full backup every night on these cartridges.

My question now: how can I instruct VEEAM (or let VEEAM detect) that there is already a backup chain going on - but on the other cartridge, so it writes on the active cartridge only an incremental backup. I have the feeling, that I'm not expressing myself adequate here, but I think you guys know what I mean.

Any suggestions how I could get this done? It seems a little excessive to always write full backups, diminishing the lifetime of those drives unnecessarily.

Thanks and best regards,

Constantin

[PetrM]

Hello,

I don't think that the reliable workarounds exist. By design, the new backup chain will be started if some backups whether full or incremental are missing from the currently attached drive.
The workflow is described on this page of our help center.

Thanks!

[foggy]

Hi Constantin, what type of jobs and repositories are you using? Incremental backups are possible for backup copies to a Windows repository-based rotated media.

[frey_klein]

Hi guys,

I'll have a closer look to the article you both posted. In the meantime: before we had the RDX drive, I always used reverse incremental, but I assumed the merging would be an unnecessary load on the cartridges/drives, so I thought for this new concept incremental would make the most sense?

Let me study this article and get back at you.

Thanks so far

Best Regards,
Constantin

[frey_klein]

Hi again,

I read the article - so essentially, what I want is not possible.

What would suffice for me is something like this:

MONDAY
RDX Cartridge 1 - FULL
TUESDAY
RDX Cartridge 2 - FULL
WEDNESDAY
RDX Cartridge 1 - INCREMENTAL, added to the full backup of RDX-1 on Monday
THURSDAY
RDX Cartridge 2 - INCREMENTAL, added to the full backup of RDX-2 on Tuesday
FRIDAY
RDX Cartridge 1 - INCREMENTAL, added to the incremental backup of RDX-1 on Wednesday

On the following week the same, adding incrementals to their respective chains.


Also not possible?

Thanks and best regards,
Constantin

[foggy]

As mentioned, this is possible with backup copy jobs pointed to a Windows-based rotated repository only.

[frey_klein]

Ok, thanks guys. I will try and set up a working configuration.

Thanks and best regards,
Constantin