Changing backup destination on an existing job

[Moebius]

Hello,
I have some backup jobs that use a soho NAS (a Buffalo Terastation Pro (TS-RHTGL/R5 F/W 1.27)) as the backup destination, with very disappointing performance. The indicated speed never exceeded 16 MB/s. I ran some benchmarks on the target using Atto Bench32, which confirmed this is a limit of the device and unrelated to Veeam.

Yesterday I tried to point the backup to another network share that should give better performance. I did the registry hack indicated here to force the creation of a new VBK. Then I tried to edit my jobs but the wizard didn't let me, complaining that the VBK and the VRB files are missing on the new target.

Shouldn't the reg hack avoid this problem and let me change my jobs regardless of the presence of the backup files or am I missing something? I am using Veeam B&R 5.0.2 64bit, with reverse incrementals.

Do I really have to recreate the jobs? This is a tedious task as I have to select many VMs scattered troughout the VSphere structure and set different backup options for many of them.

On a separate note, it would be nice if in the future releases there was the possibility of:
- duplicate (clone) an existing job,
- set a default value in the Exclusion window for all the selected VMs. I backup only the system volume and every time I create a new job I have to go through all of them (50+) to change the "all volume" default value. Same thing for the indexing options.

[Rumple]

what you need to do is move the original backup files to the new backup location and then you can change the job to point to this new location and it will happily let you make the change.

[odruard]

Hello Moebius

I'm not a specialist (I hope I'll become some day ), but during my tests I encountered a problem very close from yours.

Here is the solution I applied :
- In Backups view, deletion of all history : right click, remove from backups (beware to not choose delete from disk)
- Modification of jobs to set the new path
- In Jobs view, start manually a full backup on each job : right click, perform full backup
If you need to restore from the old NAS, you'll just need to import your backups files : right click on Backups in left pane, Import backups, choose location and vbk file (vib and vrb files attached to vbk file will automatically be imported too).

Rumple's solution should work too, but it could need days if there is a large volume of backup files and a very low transfer rate.

Remarks :
- English is not my native language, then I hope that I correctly understood your problem, and that I'm clear in my explanations.
- You probably don't need the details I gave on actions to perform, but I filled in them because it could help some other unskilled users.

Hope it can help.

Olivier

[Moebius]

Thank you Olivier!
It's true that moving the backup files from the NAS to the new location is not an option. There are some TB worth of files and at 16MB/s it would take ages.
I hadn't thought of clearing the backup history. I'll try it asap.

(And English is not my mother tongue either, but yours seems perfect to me!)

I still would like to know Veeam's stand on my side notes.

Thanks,
Lucio

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Lucio,

The registry hack mentioned refers tothe situation when backup files are missing from destination and you need to re-create them, but you as it was correctly stated this hack doesn't cover a change backup destination scenario.

Olivier is correct, you need to remove backup files from the console, this will delete the corresponding records from Veeam SQL configuration database and will keep all the backup files intact on the target storage, thus meaning you will always have an ability to import those files and perform a restore job.

Please also note that both the registry hack and "removing scenario" will force new backup chain creation.

Thanks.

[Ballos]

[merged into existing discussion]

Hi,

I'm using Veeam Backup & Replication 5.0 to do Backup of 3 ESXi Servers with about 80 VMs.

Before Veeam we backup to 6 Devices. 2 Devices for one ESXi Server.

One device is in the office and one in the safe. With veeam we want to do this too. But I get an error when I want to do an backup on the second device.

Publishing catalog session
Storage file '\\192.168.217.XXX\volume_1\OSBackup Test2011-06-20T123816.vbk' is missing from host 'My Computer'. If you are using initial replica seeding, please follow the instruction from the readme.txt file in the chosen seeding location. If you changed replica destination in the replication job settings, please make sure you have moved all replica files to the new destination correctly.

How can I backup to two different devices without copying the last backup from hand ?

The backupplan is:

Monday - Device A
Tuesday - Device B
Wendsday - Device A
Thursday - Device B
Friday - Device A
Saturday - Device B
Sunday Device B

[Ballos]

Hi,

the workaround with the reg hack helped me with my Problem. But now I got another question.

Is it possible to do an incremental Backup to an older full Backup ?

e.g.

I do a full backup on Monday on Device A
Then a full Backup on Tuesday on Device B
Then on Wendsday I want to do a incremental Backup on Device A to the full Backup of Monday combined to one file.
Then on Thursday an incremental Backup on Device B to the full Backup of Tuesday combined to one file.
...

Is this possible ?


Ps.: I hope you understand me, because english is not my native language

[Gostev]

No, this is not possible. To achieve something like that, you would need to set up a separate jobs for each Device, and run it when the corresponding device is connected.

[Ballos]

ok. That works, but the program don't combine the incremental Bakcup with the full Backup.

I tried it in this constallation:

one device. In the backupjob is configurated that only 1 Restorepoints keep on disk and delete VM retention period 7 days

- I did a full Backup
- I put the systemclock to the next day an did an incremental Backup
- So I did it 10 times. Every time I changed the systemclock to the next day

But now I got one full backup and 10 incremental backups.


Why he dont delete some of the incremental Backups ? There more incremental Backups than 7 days ??

[Vitaliy S.]

There is no need to adjust system time to apply retention policy settings. If you've chosen forward incremental backup mode then the behavior you observe is far more than expected.

Should more info be required please look through this topic: Rollback points and full backups

Deleted VM retention period has nothing to do with the system time, please take a look at this topic for more details on how it works: Deleted VMs Retention Period