CopyJobs: Rotated Drives on Shared Folders - how to delete old chains

[f.neumann]

Hello Community,

we've seen new behaviour (since V11?) with CopyJobs on NetworkShares with rotating media.
There are still multiple small business customers using 1-Bay NAS as rotating media repository for Backup CopyJobs instead of RDX/USB. We're moving towards RDX/USB but as long as existing NetworkDrives are fine, customers will keep using them.

By now there has been no issue with backup-chains and especially deletion of old restore points.
At least by using

Code: Select all

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication\ForceDeleteBackupFiles

Registry-Key Veeam reliably handled/removed old backup-files on those rotating network shares. (https://www.veeam.com/kb1154)

According to current documentation (https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110):

"As soon as Veeam Backup & Replication starts a new backup chain on the drive, it removes information about restore points from previous backup chains from the configuration database. Backup files corresponding to these previous restore points are not deleted, they remain on disk."

Old chains will just remain on theses disks and ... need to be deleted manually ...?!

Additionally support told us (Case #05274934) that the registry key will not affect network share backed rotating media repositories any longer. But it did, for years!

So how to handle old remaining backup-files/-chains on rotating media?! As this was fine for years... Should we create custom pre- or post-backupcopy-scripts to handle such basic tasks?
Leaving old Chains on disk as they are and removing options to delete them automatically makes us struggle...

I might understand that handling backup-chains on rotating drives with cifs share requieres a different mechanism than local USB/RDX-drives. But where's the problem with deleting whole job-folder on rotation, if configured by registry-key?

Best,
Florian

[PetrM]

Hi Florian,

Our help center describes the default behavior and does not take into account additional registry values. The registry value ForceDeleteBackupFiles is described in a separate KB but I'm wondering to know what is the issue now and how did our engineer come to the conclusion that the mentioned registry value is no longer applicable to network shares with rotated media?

Thanks!

[f.neumann]

Hi Petr,

we had the issue that Jobfolder was not cleared on media rotation at all, while registrykey ForceDeleteBackupFiles=3 was set. So our customers rotating network drives ran out of space periodically. That‘s why we opened a case.

I‘m not sure how your engineer came to the conclusion, registrykey would not apply in this scenario. He told us, we should connect external drives to another windows server and add that server as a rotating media repository to make registrykey work as intended.

As this is somehow confusing I’d like to verify here, if the registrykey can still be used on rotating cifs shares in V11? Or whether there‘s another best practise, how to get rid of old backupcopy chains in V11, were not aware of!

[PetrM]

Hi Florian,

An interesting detail is that it worked without any issues before upgrade and I'm not aware of any intentional changes in this part of logic. I will clarify it with our support team and my colleagues from QA department and update the topic as soon as I have more information.

Thanks!

[f.neumann]

Great, thanks in advance!

[PetrM]

Hi Florian,

The original case has been closed because our engineers were unable to reach the customer after a few attempts on separate business days. I've asked to open a new one, the number is: 05289483. Looks like our engineers have found an error that potentially could provoke the issue, the research is in progress now again, let's wait for the results.

Thanks!