Standalone backup agent for Microsoft Windows servers and workstations (formerly Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE)
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limegreen

Having trouble turning Active Full Backup off

Post by limegreen »

Hello,

I'm a new user and have some questions I'm hoping to get a little help with. I've looked through the online help pages but I'm still a little confused.

When I configured the backup settings for the first time, I set Veeam to "keep backups for the past 30 days when the computer was running" and to run an Active Full Backup once a month. I'm using an 4TB external Seagate HDD to store the backup files.

My questions:

1) Here's a screenshot of the contents of my backup drive so you can see the files generated by Veeam.

https://pasteboard.co/HedVZC6.png

As you can see, Veeam created the first full backup file on 2/6/18, and then daily incremental files after that. On 3/5 (the 30 day mark), it tried to create a new Active Full Backup but failed because it ran out of room on my 4TB drive. That's understandable.

So at that point, I turned off the Active Full Backup and reduced the number of restore points from 30 to 10, thinking that would give me enough breathing room. Based on what I read here: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agent ... tml?ver=21 I expected that with my new settings Veeam would remove obsolete files, transform the backup chain and continue to generate new incremental .vib files. Instead, it started to generate a new large .vbk file, and failed again because it ran out of room. Is this expected behavior?

I deleted the partial .vbk file and tried again, but Veeam continued to behave in the same way. As you can see, I turned Veeam off on 3/7 because I wasn't sure what to do next. (And yes, it's taken me this long to finally ask the forum about this!)

Can someone explain what is happening, and what I need to do to get things running correctly again? Do I need to just delete everything and start over?

I have a couple more general questions as well:

2) The reason I'm using Veeam in the first place is because for some reason the built-in Windows 10 File History suddenly just stopped working. After trying to troubleshoot it for weeks, I gave up and installed Veeam instead. By default, File History keeps every version of every file forever until it runs out of room. I'd like Veeam to do the same thing but it seems like it only keeps [x] days of file history (in my case, 10) and the old versions are lost. Is that true?

3) Also, is this backup strategy very vulnerable to failure? If I understand correctly, if any of the .vib files gets corrupted, then I'll lose backups for every subsequent day. And if the full .vbk backup file gets corrupted, then I lose the entire 1.8TB backup and will be left with nothing. Is this true? With the Windows 10 File History model, if indivduals files get corrupted, then only those files are lost - you don't lose the entire thing. If that's true, what's the benefit of using a small number of very large files?

Thank you so much in advance for reading all of this! Any help is most appreciated.
PTide
Product Manager
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Re: Having trouble turning Active Full Backup off

Post by PTide »

Hi and welcome to the community!
Can someone explain what is happening, and what I need to do to get things running correctly again? Do I need to just delete everything and start over?
I would suggest you to contact our support team on that as the described behaviour doesn't look right at all. Please don't forget to post your case ID.

Thanks
limegreen

Re: Having trouble turning Active Full Backup off

Post by limegreen »

Hello and apologies for the late reply! I didn't get a notification about your response to my post - thank you. I'll contact support.
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