Capacity tier download issue

[squebel]

Hello, case 07236842 has been opened but wanted to post here...

I am downloading archive bak files that have been tiered off to capacity tier and bringing them back to the performance sobr extents. I found out, the hard way, that during the download task, the existing backup job for that vm will not run and will fail. The error I get is: "Task failed. Error: Item [BackupJobName] is locked by running session SOBR Download [Backup Download]". I don't understand why it works this way and the support engineer wasn't able to find anything in the documentation that calls this out. This seems like kind of a big deal (to me at least.)

Also, I assumed the download would also remove that backup from the capacity tier after the successful download back to the performance tier. It does not seem to do that and I need it to because I don't want duplicate copies of the same backup. Is there a way to get what I need?

[sfirmes]

When you download/copy a backup from the capacity tier to the performance tier, VBR doesn’t remove the backup from the capacity tier. So the behavior you are seeing is expected.

If you want to remove the downloaded backup from the performance tier once you are done with it, you can do so via moving backup to capacity tier. This will result in you only having one copy of the backup again and it will be in the capacity tier.

Hope this helps.

Steve

[squebel]

Ugh, yeah, not what I want. If it's going to download it, we should have the option to also delete it after the download. And manually deleting stuff from object is nearly impossible and being forced to delete the entire set of backups for a server is not good. Never has been and this makes it worse.

[squebel]

Found another quirk with this: it will always download it to the same performance extent it came off of. The extent it wants to send it to is getting low on space and would have left only a few hundred GBs left on the extent after the download when the others have 10TB+ free. I tried to trick it by putting that extent into maintenance mode and have it download to another extent. Nope, big ugly error. Grrr....

[sfirmes]

Ugh, yeah, not what I want.

What is the use case that you are trying to solve via copying a backup from the capacity tier to the performance tier?

Thanks

Steve

[squebel]

We have a customer that is being very particular about where, geographically, their backups are located. We started offloading older backups to capacity tier to help with space savings on the performance tier but now I am being told that those backups all need to exist in the same physical location. So, if I download the vbk back to the performance tier, our billing software is going to see that there are now 2 instances of that same Full backup (3TB) and charge the customer all the logical space those two vbk files represent. The simple solution (in this case) is to be able to download the vbk file (which works great) and then purge the vbk from the object side. Fringe? Maybe but there it is.

[sfirmes]

Thanks for clarifying the use case. When using a SOBR swith a capacity tier, your use case can't be solved. You could create another primary repository that doesn't have a capacity tier and then move the backup from your existing repository to the new one. But you will not be satifying the 3-2-1 rule at that point.

Steve

[squebel]

Another issue: it keeps trying to download the file from the capacity tier to the same extent as where (I guess) it came off of. Even though the documentation says that if there is not enough space on the extent, it will pick another. There is only 900GB free on this extent and the file is almost 3TB in size. Is it just going to fill this extent up and cause problems? Why didn't it pick another extent?

[squebel]

Case 07244382 has been opened on the issue mentioned above where it picks an extent that does not have sufficient space.

[sfirmes]

Thanks for posting the case#. I’ll follow up with support to see what I can learn and will update you.

Steve