Associating a new machine with old machine in protection group

[Jeremy Mueller]

We're having an issue when users receive new laptops. We're wanting to connect those new laptops to the old laptop backups. The new laptops receive the old laptop names during the upgrade process. When we try to run the Veeam.Agent.Configurator.exe on the new machines with the -setVBRsettings flag to the Protection Group's XML file, the new machine receives the error:

Unable to register agent: the agent with the same hostname is already registered

During my test, I deleted the old computer object from the Protection Group. That allowed me to re-run the configurator command and register the machine.

The machine is now able to take new backups. But the new machine cannot view the old machine's backups in the taskbar icon. It can only view the backups for the new machine.

We can still get to the old backups either using VBEM (which only some users have access to) or the VBR Console itself (which no end users have access to).

What I would like is to re-associate the new machine with the old machine's computer object. Is that possible?

Our setup:

Veeam server is 11.0.1.1261 P20220302
Windows Agent is 5.0.3.4708

We've created a Protection Group for each set of our Agents. In this case, the group is named "Workstations". To install the agent, we use a package installer and XML generated for that Protection Group.

The backup job is configured as a "Type: Server", "Mode: Managed by agent" and will backup any machine in that Protection Group to a SOBR (Backup Mode is Entire computer).

Thanks,

Jeremy

[HannesK]

Hello,
yes, that's by design to prevent that a new user / machine can access backups of an old user / machine (security...). It would be possible to give a user access to a whole repository. But that would be too much I guess.

For bare metal restore, we add a way in V12 / V6 that users can access whatever backup is needed "on demand". There the backup admin creates a token / password, that allows access to everyone with the token / password to specific backups.

Best regards,
Hannes

[Jeremy Mueller]

Hannes,

Thanks for the response. I think, for the users that need access to their old backups, we'll just setup a user for them in VBEM with access just to that machine.

Thanks,

Jeremy