Help! Drive seems to be missing from backup?

[mjgreen81]

Hi all,

We are in the process of moving our users to a new file server. We are about half way through.

The drives on the new file server are C:\ U:\ (roaming profiles) and V:\ (Home folders)

We have a Veeambackup job that runs nightly backing up this server. If I edit the job and look at the size reported, it shows 673GB which matches up with the size reserved for C:\ U:\ and V:\ combined (although only approx 100gb is actually being used).

I have just tried to restore some files from something in a users home folder (V:\). Upon running the restore job it reports that the VM size is 80gb and when the file browser launches I have C:\ D:\ and E:\ to choose from???

C:\ just seems to be a boot section D:\ has WIndows/Program Files etc and E:\ has the profiles which are actually the U:\ drive??

V:\ is a hidden share - should this matter?

Whats happening here? Any help appreciated

[veremin]

Him Mike. I assume that you’re using “Restore Windows files” type of restore. What if you try to utilize the “Other OS”, instead, and see whether the missing drive is shown or not? Thanks.

[mjgreen81]

Hi there, thanks for your reply.

Yes I am using 'Guest Files (Windows)' as my type of restore.

I have never tied 'Other OS' and get prompted to select a host to run my FLR appliance on. This is not something I am familiar with and am a bit worried about what will happen. As mentioned before, my backup job shows the size as 673GB (even though the size of the vbk is only 10GB) and I dont want to risk breaking something by using up a load of space on the host.

Can you reassure me please!

[veremin]

Don’t worry about host space usage or whatsoever. During the restoration, the data will be retrieved directly from the backup file and the host is needed only in order to run a Linux-based virtual appliance that using vPower NFS gets access to the VMDK files located inside backup file. The appliance is very small – around 20 MB and takes only 10 seconds to boot.

Thanks.

[mjgreen81]

I choose one of hosts and got a message "not enough free space, an additional 17.7mb is required"

Any ideas why?

[veremin]

Is it possible that either specified host or resource pool doesn’t have enough space to run even such a small appliance? Or the vPower NFS root folder is deprived of free space? You need to be sure that this volume has at least 10 GB of free space available. Thanks.

[mjgreen81]

I am a little bit worried about experimenting with this too much at the moment as I am on my own in the office and don't want to damage anything.

I think I might setup a temporay backup using robocopy or something for the next couple of nights until the rest of the guys in my team get back!

[veremin]

Whenever you don’t feel confident in actions that should be taken in order to solve this or that particular issue, you can easily contact our support team and they will be glad to assist you with it. Thanks.

[mjgreen81]

Thank you. My manager has a much better knowledge than me so I will ask him when he is back on Monday - If not, we will go to support.

Luckily, the file I need turned out to be a false alarm and the user still has the file. Need to solve this ASAP though.

[veremin]

As the other potential option, you might want to run this VM directly from the backup file using Instant VM Recovery functionality and see whether the drive in question is there or not. Thanks.

[mjgreen81]

It looks like possibly one of the discs (the important one!) was not ticked under 'exclusions' in the job. We have now ticked this and will see if everything works tonight.

[veremin]

Hmm, you mean you specifically set up in the job settings the scope of virtual disks that should be backed up and the disk in question wasn’t selected ther, right? In other words, I’m interested in what the exclusion settings of this job are. (Virtual Machine -> Exclusions -> Disks). Thanks.

[mjgreen81]

Please see below:

SCSI 0:2 is the 'V:\' drive. This was previously unselected



The only reason we can think for this was that when we created this file server a few months ago, we created it with a slightly different drive arrangement (I think we only had two drives originally).

The Veeam backup job would have been created between the time we added the extra drive and possibly was not correctly updated afterwards.

[veremin]

Yep, you’re right. The disk will not be backed up, as long as it’s deselected. Probably, if you’re not interested in disk exclusion any longer, it stands to reason to set “all disks” option in order to avoid this situation from happening again.

Thanks.

[mjgreen81]

Ok great, thanks for your help.

I still find the drive letters a bit strange, but I understand from reading other discussions on this forum that in the version of Veeam we are using, the drive letters are shown in the order they are created and do not necessarily match how they are displayed in the OS.

I can live with that as long as the files are backed up!

[mjgreen81]

I just wanted to confirm that I have checked the backups this morning and I am now backing up the missing drive

Thanks again for your help

[veremin]

Glad to hear that you’ve finally nailed it down. Should any additional help be needed, feel free to contact us.