Feature Request - Exclude a job from a job

[TitaniumCoder477]

We setup a half dozen role-based jobs to protect specific assets. Then we setup a general job as an "opt-out" job, but unfortunately this is likely to devolve because the other assets had to be added as exclusions which is going to need doing for months and years ahead. It would be really sweet to simply exclude the other jobs. That is, this general job would exclude the other jobs. Veeam would automatically figure out what assets are included in the other jobs and implicitly exclude them from this job. This means the software can keep track of exclusions instead of a human who is prone to forgetfulness. Please add this to the wish list/feature request list!

[ronnmartin61]

So in a nutshell you're saying you created a backup job to protect all the unique/unprotected VM's from the exclude lists of all the other backup jobs correct?

[TitaniumCoder477]

Uhhh... maybe? Lol. I'm having a hard time computing what you wrote.

There's basically two ways of setting up jobs: Opt-In or Opt-Out.

My personal belief is that setting up all jobs as the former is dangerous because human beings tend towards forgetfulness, and a critical asset might go unprotected for a while before one realizes it needed to be opted in to a job.

Thus most of our clients' backup jobs are very simple and configured as the latter.

However, I just ran into a scenario recently where it made sense to create all of the jobs as opt-in. But to cover the risk above, I created one job as opt-out and THEN realized a new "forgetfulness problem" was bound to happen--forgetting to opt-out of the opt-out job the assets that were opted in to one of the opt-in jobs! The best solution would be to create the ability for a job's exclusion list to source assets from another job.

Example:
- PLT-CHARLOTTE-LBS-SQLAssets: Opt-In w/ three SQL servers only
- PLT-CHARLOTTE-LBS-EverythingElse: Opt-Out w/ vCenter as source

Problem: The three SQL servers would get backed up in both jobs unless they were manually added to the second job, i.e. opted-out. Obviously for this simplistic scenario, just adding them manually would be fine. But the scenario I ran into recently was 10x this in magnitude so this was not desireable.

Solution: PLT-CHARLOTTE-LBS-EverythingElse: Opt-Out w/ vCenter as source AND exclusion list includes PLT-CHARLOTTE-LBS-SQLAssets, which means that any asset in that job is excluded

Hopefully this makes sense.

[ronnmartin61]

I'm still not sure I'm following you either but perhaps a job that includes everything (vCenter, tags, cluster, etc.) could be used and then global exclusions https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... de&ver=120 could be applied to only explicitly exclude some VM's. In this way any new VM added over time would be automatically included.

[TitaniumCoder477]

That's way more tedius. Perhaps a diagram will help.

The way things currently are, two steps are required to ensure an asset is protected in an opt-in job and excluded from an opt-out job. But if a job was able to exclude another job, then only one step would be necessary--opting the asset into the opt-in job.

If this doesn't help, I'm not sure what else to tell you.