Issue with Veeam and Azure

[Eric1404]

Been running Veeam for 2 years now, doing an hourly backup to a physical backup server. Three times a day Azure uploads those files to the cloud. This has all been working flawlessly, but lately Azure keeps trying to upload the large vbk file which is what I assume the incrementals get rolled up to. Now 3 times a day Azure is trying to upload 600 GB's, when normally it would load up about 35 GB's a day. I haven't touched either of them, but since Azure is just backing up files that have changed, I kind of feel like this has something to do with Veeam? It must be changing that vbk file, which causes Azure to upload it. I have noticed that the modified date on that file is changing after the Veeam backup is run, but not sure if that has always happened. All this started about a month ago.

[Gostev]

When you say "Azure uploads those files to the cloud" what specific mechanism or tool do you mean by "Azure"?

If you're using our native Azure blob storage integration (Capacity Tier of the scale-out backup repository) then you should open a support case and have our engineers take a look, as what you're saying is unexpected and not how this functionality is designed to work. It was purposely built to upload changes only. Regardless of whether or not the backup files are changing, any data blocks which were previously uploaded should never be uploaded and stored in the cloud again. This makes no sense from the cloud storage costs perspective alone.

However, if you're using some 3rd party tool or utility to physically copy Veeam backup files to blob storage, then unfortunately you're out of luck and are on your own with this issue, as Veeam explicitly does not support this approach.

[Eric1404]

I am not using the blob storage integration, I am using the Microsoft Azure Backup Agent, which it copies the files up to an Azure Recovery Services Vault. I understand that Veeam will not support Azure and vice versa, they both will probably blame the other, this is why I haven't entered any tickets and am posting on a forum to see if anyone has any ideas to solve my problem.

[veremin]

It seems you have just reached the specified retention period and the chain has started transforming or the backup mode has been changed recently from forward incremental to forever forward incremental which again caused the chain transformation. You can find more information regarding it here.

Also, any reason not to use Capacity Tier (Veeam way to offload backups to Azure Blob Storage without copying full backup each time)?

Thanks!

[Eric1404]

I think you might be spot on. Looking at my incremental setup, there is nothing for synthetic or active full backups. Not sure why that changed, retention policy is only 400, so would have hit that limit long ago, and looking at my previous backup report it seems like once a month it was doing a large backup, so this had to have changed. I've set up an active full backup monthly, feel like that should solve this issue.

[veremin]

Be aware with current setup once a month a new full backup will be uploaded to Azure - I think you know this, but it never hurts to be rest assured.

Glad to hear that my input was helpful.

Cheers!