Feature Request: Options for air-gapped Backup Copy jobs

[NathanR]

To augment our protection against ransomware, we have recently purchased a single USB drive to store air-gapped backups (and also provide long-term storage for GFS copies). I know there are several ways to accomplish this, but my setup is as follows:

8TB USB drive (ReFS, 64k) attached to PC at my desk
PC at my desk configured as Repository (Windows Server) in Veeam
Backup Copy job - Copy every 1 Day starting at 8:15AM; this job can transfer data M-F 8:00AM-3:59PM

I plug in the drive every morning and then remove it mid-morning after the data has transferred. This works great during the week, but on the weekends while the drive is unplugged, Veeam throws errors beginning at 8:15AM. It appears that despite the job being configured to only transfer data M-F, Veeam still "checks" the repository at the scheduled copy interval. The errors are benign, but it would be nice to have a clean backup history.

There are a couple of ways that I think Veeam could handle this.
(1) Provide a "Copy every X week(s)" option (with check boxes for each day of the week, similar to what we see in Windows Task Scheduler)
(2) Provide an option to schedule jobs to be enabled/disabled.

I would think there are other companies with smedium sized virtual infrastructures that might benefit from this low-cost approach to air-gapped backups. Thanks for hearing me out!

[foggy]

Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated. Currently you can temporarily disable and enable the job back using the PowerShell scripts.

What is the actual error you're seeing on weekend, btw?

[NathanR]

I didn't realize jobs could be disabled/enabled using Powershell scripts. That's a reasonable workaround. I'll give it a shot this weekend.

The error message is:

Code: Select all

Failed to preprocess target Error: The system cannot find the path specified.
Unable to create target storage, processing will be retried (retry 1 out of 6)
Failed to preprocess target Error: The system cannot find the path specified.
Unable to create target storage, processing will be retried (retry 2 out of 6)
Failed to preprocess target Error: The system cannot find the path specified.
Unable to create target storage, processing will be retried (retry 3 out of 6)
Failed to preprocess target Error: The system cannot find the path specified.
Unable to create target storage, processing will be retried (retry 4 out of 6)
Failed to preprocess target Error: The system cannot find the path specified.
Unable to create target storage, processing will be retried (retry 5 out of 6)
Failed to preprocess target Error: The system cannot find the path specified.
Unable to create target storage, processing will be retried (retry 6 out of 6)
Could not perform threshold check for backup location "V:\Backups" due to space info retrievement fail!
Error: The system cannot find the path specified.All tasks have already been processed

[foggy]

Thanks. This can be improved, indeed - no reason to touch the target in case the transfer is not allowed.

[myFist]

Is it possible to disalbe the warnings / errors of the copy jobs if the transfer is not allowed for 24 h and the job should runs everyday?

[foggy]

Currerntly this is not possible.

[myFist]

Then a normal schedule would be nice: Start on "Week days" or "These Days". And maybe you can add the option to do continuous or periodical.

[Hexa]

Hi,

We are currently working with Veeam B&R 9.5.1.1536 and would like to have a way to configure Copy jobs that are periodically checking for the files on the repository, and if they are unable to find the files or access the repository they will throw warning errors. Unfortunately at the moment there does not appear to be a way to configure that particular setting. I dont know if there are other clients that are doing it this way but we have a NAS storage that is waking up only for 2 hours during the day(Call it Worst case Scenario Backup - Ransomware) Veeam Copy Job role here is to do the transfer during this time . Currently we will receive allot of warnings before the schedule and even more on weekends when this backup in not even needed. So we are just disabling the copy jobs for the weekend and will enable it only Monday morning.

Propose solution: A radio button - Don't check for network drive/storage before the Allowed Schedule. Or maybe something smarter than this .

P.S. Sorry for my English ... not my first language.

CaseID#02806410

Thanks.

[foggy]

Thanks for the request. Sounds similar to the above.

[cableguy]

Hi,

with the community edition, we do I nightly backup to a local hard drive on the backup server. I would like to copy that backup once a week to a set of rotating external USB drives. Thise drives should only be attached once a week, like every Monday, and are stored offsite for the rest of the time.

To achieve this, I am using a Backup Copy job, which generally works fine. I've tried to set the copy interval to 7 days and set up the schedule so these external backups are only allowed on Mondays during daytime.

However, I still get lots of emails on the other days of the week telling me that the Backup copy job has failed because the external drive could not be found.

Is what I am trying to do something goes against the ideas behind backup copy jobs? Would it be better to just let the external drive be attached to the server for a week and then rotate the drives every Monday?

Also, is there a way of telling Veeam backup & replication to send emails about failed backups less often?

Cheers,

Andreas

[foggy]

Hi Andreas, there's no way to suppress these notifications, but you can temporarily disable the job as mentioned above.