Best Full Backup Copy Method

[sheath777]

Hello all. New to Veeam, hopefully someone can help out.

I've setup some incremental backup jobs with 30 days retention and monthly Active full backups. (May change to Weekly, not sure yet.) I'm trying to find the best way to either copy just the Full backups to USB drives on a different physical server, or create a new stand alone full backup (VeeamZip or VM Copy) to write to the USB drives, and swap out the drives either weekly or monthly. I found where the "ForceCreateMissingVBK" reg key is supposed to help with Backup Copy jobs and swapping USB drives, but I couldn't get it to work and was informed in my case ID#00482359 that the key doesn't work in v7 R2. I really don't want to have to manually run VeeamZip jobs so I tried to setup VM Copy jobs but they all fail with:

"Unable to establish direct connection to the shared storage (SAN). Please ensure that: - HBA is properly installed in the Veeam Backup server computer, or software iSCSI initiator is configured correctly. - SAN volume can be seen by operating system in the Windows Disk Management snap-in on the Veeam Backup server. - Read access is allowed for the Veeam Backup server computer on the corresponding LUN (refer to your SAN documentation)."

SAN and hot-add both work for the other jobs and I know I have the iSCSI initiators setup correctly. When the VM Copy jobs fail they aren't even trying to use a different transport mode. Even when I setup the proxies to use only Virtual Appliance or Network mode it still just uses SAN mode and fails. I've opened case ID#00483486 for the VM Copy failures but haven't heard back yet. Any advice is most appreciated. Thanks!

[Fiskepudding]

Here is another aproach, with same goal, "get full backups to USB..."

We have plenty of storage, so in our main job (incrementals weekdays and Active fulls every friday) goes to our main repository.
In addition we have another job that just run fulls backups to a NAS every saturday.

We then (on monday) bring enough USB disks and copy these full backups off the NAS. (offcause we could take them from our main repoistory as well, if we did run the aditional NAS backup)
We just copy the latest .VBM and .VBK fils (VBM can offause be skipped)
You can offcause script this too.

Don't know if the "Backup copy job" is right for us since the number of USB disks we need changes (depening on backups size and the size of the USB connected disks)
We find the above solution to be straigt forward and it works fine.

[veremin]

The ForceCreateMissingVBK doesn't seems to work as expected in case of backup jobs. As to backup copy jobs, apart from using the said regkey, you also have to utilize certain scripts.

Thanks.

[sheath777]

Thanks guys, I appreciate the feedback. I was hoping to get this all automated through the gui rather than manual intervention or scripts. I'm not much of a PS scripting guy (yet) so I was playing around with forfiles and robocopy scripts to copy data from the regular backup jobs. I'm sure I can get that to work but I'd really love to get it all automated without external scripts.

Has anyone seen the particular VM Copy job failures mentioned above? It sure seems like a bug to me. Thanks again...

[sheath777]

I see that, according to Veeam, I'm a "Lurker."

Funny stuff.

[foggy]

I really don't want to have to manually run VeeamZip jobs

And you do not have to, since you can trigger VeeamZIP on a desired schedule with a pretty simple PowerShell script via use Windows Task Manager. Here's another example of such script.

Regarding the VM copy error, do you see that the correct proxy server (the one that is explicitly set to use hotadd or network mode) is selected for processing in the job session log?

[sheath777]

Thanks for the script Foggy. I forgot to mention earlier that I'd rather use VM Copy jobs over VeeamZIP since they're able to use Application-Aware processing. I haven't seen that ability in VeeamZIP but please correct me if I'm wrong.

The correct proxy is showing up in the session log (I've used multiple proxies and restarted the Veeam Backup Proxy Service on the proxy after making changes) but it always uses SAN mode and then fails regardless of being setup to use the other modes.

BTW, Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

[foggy]

Correct, VeeamZIP uses VMware Tools quiescence, not application-aware image processing.

Please continue investigating the VM Copy issue with technical support.