Backup settings disappeared - any way to recover?

[notarobot]

Help! Backup settings mysteriously disappeared. Is it recoverable?

I installed Veeam on a client's laptop and for a couple years it has faithfully been performing a volume level (I think) backup to external hard drive. Intention is to be able to do a bare metal restore in case of hard drive failure - which may be imminent as he is experiencing a lot of "not responding" messages and other errors. We did create a recovery flash drive and updated it several months ago. (Dell laptop, Win10 Pro)

A few days ago Windows Defender detected a Trojan virus in an outlook attachment, which it claims to have either deleted or quarantined. I ran several more scans with Defender, Malwarebytes, Webroot's online scan tool, and some other malware scanners. I then ran a tool called Farbar Recovery Scan Tool (FRST) to generate some reports which I submitted to the site bleepingcomputer.com for analysis. (The analyst said logs looked clean.)

Next day (and a few reboots later Im sure) I opened Veeam to check backup history. Instead of showing me the backup bar chart, it opened to a configure backup set window. Our backup settings are gone. The external drive, which I had client disconnect when virus was detected, still shows all the backup files.

Is there any way to recover the backup settings, or at least configure new backup set that can continue to use the existing backup history and not start from scratch?

Thanks, Veeam community!

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Support Case ID: 04146598

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Daniel,
you can create a new job and use Map Backup option on Storage tab to link new job to the existing chain and next backup shall be incremental. Note, that You don't need to do that in order to restore data from old restore points, as Recovery wizards can be pointed to restore points which are not visible in the Agent History UI.
/Cheers!

[notarobot]

Thank you, Egor. That is a big relief to hear.

I don't recall if I had set up original backup to do volume or whole computer backup - just that it was essentially the whole computer so that we could perform bare metal restore if necessary (which it looks like I am going to have to do in the next week or two). Does it make a difference which option I choose when I use Map Backup, if it is not the same option I used initially?

Secondly - if I want to rotate between two backup drives weekly, so that in case of ransomware there will always be a disconnected backup that can't get encrypted - do i just use one single backup set and swap the drives weekly, or do I need to create a second backup set for the second backup drive? It would be identical backups on the two drives.

[Egor Yakovlev]

- difference does make in terms of new backup size - if backup mode will be different(say it was File-Level and now you set Entire machine, for example) your expected "incremental" backup might yield full data backup instead, so it is a question of "mapping" usefulness. Best to just start a new chain and keep old backup chain intact.
- you can surely use Rotated Drives with just 1 backup job. Check out this guide.
/Thanks!