Copying old backups to new VBK file?

[TimWalker]

Hi
Apologies if I'm missing something obvious on this one - I've not been using veeam very long!

So we brought in veeam this summer, I've set up our GFS backup structure and for various reasons I've set our yearly backups to occur on the 1st Sunday in January.

This creates the problem that in due course our initial backup will be automatically purged from our repository, potentially when it is rather less than a year old - really I'd like to hold onto it until we have a couple of yearly backups in place.

Is there an easy way to delete-protect this initial backup (or mark it as yearly perhaps) in order to preserve it? I think at present it is marked Monthly.

Obviously we can take the dumb approach of copying these files elsewhere and import them but I'm hoping there might be something a bit neater that preserves catalogues etc.

Secondly and on a similar note, our main storage is using Windows Server deduplication and working very nicely. If I want to copy one of the older backups to one of our other repositories (or onto a USB cold storage drive say) I then have a problem - because the VBK files are uncompressed and per machine, they aren't very space efficient on this other storage - is there a way to run a manual backup copy job of an old backup (in order to create a single, more heavily compressed & veeam deduplicated VBK file) - backup copy only seems to want to create backups of present/future states rather than past ones.

The only alternatives I've come up with so far are running 7-zip and making an archive of the vbk files (which is slow and will be very slow if I need to restore anything, as I'll need to unzip the vbks from it first) or mounting a new VHDX file, copying the files across and deduplicating that - which feels a bit overcomplicated (and will be slow waiting for windows to deduplicate the files - i'm not even sure if you can turn on deduplication for mounted VHDX files without attaching them to a VM?)

Digging through the powershell documents it sounds like Export-VBRBackup might do the trick but I'm a bit concerned it'll just copy the same files.

[foggy]

This creates the problem that in due course our initial backup will be automatically purged from our repository, potentially when it is rather less than a year old - really I'd like to hold onto it until we have a couple of yearly backups in place.

Which backup do you refer to as initial? The very first full created by the backup copy job on its first run? I'm afraid there's no built-in way to preserve it, except copying it somewhere like you've mentioned. Backup copy job will maintain it by merging the oldest increment into it each time after reaching the specified retention. What you could do is set a large number of weeklies, for example, so that the first weekly is kept long enough.

The only alternatives I've come up with so far are running 7-zip and making an archive of the vbk files (which is slow and will be very slow if I need to restore anything, as I'll need to unzip the vbks from it first) or mounting a new VHDX file, copying the files across and deduplicating that - which feels a bit overcomplicated

Another a bit complicated approach would be to restore the VM from that backup and back it up again with compression.

[TimWalker]

Thanks for the reply - I have a small question on backup handling if I do (in the interim) set the job to retain a lot of weeklies - if I want to release storage by deleting the intervening weeklies, what is the correct way to do so?

So far as I can tell in the gui I can't delete a particular backup set - do I just delete the underlying VBK files? If I do this, how does it affect retention policies (eg, say I had 10 weeklies, I wanted to keep the first one but deleted 4 inbetween so only left 6 -

I had a look at performing 'instant recovery' on the old backup set and then backing that up, but it wouldn't let me because of the servers being in an instant recovery state - I guess there is no way to circumvent this and force it to do the backup?

We do just about have the capacity to temporarily stage a restore onto our veeam server then back that up but it'll certainly slow things down for a few days!

Is there any formal process for making feature requests? I can't help but think that these items (copying old backup sets, protecting a backup set) must be wanted by other people than just me!

[veremin]

Thanks for the reply - I have a small question on backup handling if I do (in the interim) set the job to retain a lot of weeklies - if I want to release storage by deleting the intervening weeklies, what is the correct way to do so?

If we're talking about removing GFS weekly backups, then, it's just a matter of removing them from a file system and forgetting them in backup server console.

I had a look at performing 'instant recovery' on the old backup set and then backing that up, but it wouldn't let me because of the servers being in an instant recovery state - I guess there is no way to circumvent this and force it to do the backup?

Are you a Hyper-V user? In case of Hyper-V you cannot backup instantly recovered VM.

Is there any formal process for making feature requests?

You've done that already by posting on these forums.

Thanks!