Health-check long backup chain

[unify_nathan]

I've inherited a mess.

There's a backup-with-associated-backup-copy-job configured in an environment I've recently started to administer.

The BCJ targets a repo that is configured as a drive on the primary Veeam B&R server that is underpinned by an iSCSI connection over a WAN link to a remote site. Throughput is 100Mbps at the best of times but there are other applications that use the link and backups are restricted to running in the 11pm - 5 timeframe. The backup history report shows almost exclusively errors or warnings around being unable to read previously stored backups, or being unable to write the desired backups within the configured time window.

Until I carved it up into more manageable chunks, there was a large Backup + BackupCopy job that protected 10 VMs / ~ 4TB of data. The BCJ retention rules have 15 daily, 12 monthly and 7 yearly RP's configured for retention. The repo appears to have a VBK from August 2020 and a chain of incrementals once per day from there through April 2021.

Is there some way to health-check the integrity of the chain of .VIBs back to the "parent" VBK back in August 2020? At a minimum to confirm that the chain is valid/ viable for restore operations, but ideally to enumerate which of the 10 VMs that were configured to be protected actually managed to get a viable RP written in to each VIB?

In related planning.... I'm going to deploy a new Veeam Proxy at the remote site where that NAS is and setup an iSCSI connection to that drive over a LAN connection and let Veeam look after the connection across the WAN. May even setup WAN accelerator gubbins. At the same time, I'm creating a plan to lift this environment to v11 so I can create a hardened linux repository and send immutable backups to this new repo in the primary site. Are there any particular benefits to doing the v11 upgrade before or after the new proxy / repo setup works? Obviously excluding the mostly trivial issue of needing to push an upgrade set of v11 components to the proxy if I do the proxy first.

Thanks,
Nathan

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums. The Veeam Backup Validator should be able to help with the integrity check.

If you just want to see the content of each of the old VBK files (I assume that per-job chains were used instead the much easier to handle per-machine chains ), then you could also use the extract tool which shows the content.

For V11 upgrade, please check the upgrade guidelines in the release notes or user guide

Best regards,
Hannes