How to identify which rotated drive contains a specific backup

[TacticalN8]

In addition to my daily backups, I created a monthly backup job that backs up to a group of 3 rotated hard drives once a month. I change out the rotated drives every week, so the monthly backup normally ends up on a different drive each month. Is there a way to determine which drive a specific backup resides on, short of keeping track somewhere outside of veeam? For example, how can I determine if my September backup is on drive 1, 2, or 3 without physically connecting each of them.

Thanks in advance.

[Moopere]

You're talking about finding files right? Or groups of files from a time period? I've been down this rabbit hole with respect to offline archives - I do not believe that Veeam tracks rotated or other offline backups (or, rather, the files contained within) once they go offline. Even when you try to use the Enterprise manager which everyone will tell you does exactly this, in my experience it doesn't - EM simply tells you that a file is on 'tape' or similar for a rotated drive (I forget what it actually says for rotated drives ... maybe 'removable'?)

If you have a stack of tapes or offlined drives and want to know about the date instances of files contained in backups, be able to choose 1 from the list and then be directed to the correct tape/drive ... you can't do it.

For archives I now create a CSV file which is a directory dump and store that with the archive as well as elsewhere for indexing purposes. Anything that isn't an archive, but is still offline, I just have to guess based on external records of when a tape was used and what backups it probably contains.

Given that this has been functionally missing over all the many years of Veeams existence I think its missing by design rather than omission. Veeam appears to be a strong and robust _online_ backup system. For archives its largely fine I guess - archives are generally stored for many many years and trying to index against 10 or 20 year old backup software isn't always easy. However, for current/live backups which are offline - I'm thinking tape more than anything here - other systems are required as Veeam really doesn't do it.

To be fair, the Veeam docs do describe their tape functionality as 'archive' functionality - I think the concept of rotated disk or other random access media is treated somewhat similarly to tape in this respect.

[TacticalN8]

Thanks for the response Moopere. Yes, that's essentially what I'm looking to do. I was just testing a restore job the other week and wanted to see what would happen when I tried to restore a file when the backup file was on another drive that was not currently connected. It looks like it will let you go until the last step to mount the backup, and then it says that the file cannot be found.

My rotated drive repository is just for copy jobs that I keep offsite, so hopefully this wouldn't be too much of an issue. For now I'll just plan to keep an external log of what drive each monthly backup resides on. Thanks again.

[paallergy]

I used the following instructions to write the disk volume label to the job log:

https://horstmann.in/write-volume-label ... r-job-log/