How to move the backup chain of just one vm

[Moebius]

I have a situation where two repositories are getting full: both the primary backup and the backup copy repositories. All backup chains are of the forward-incremental-forever type.

I would like to free some space in these repositories by moving the backup chains of one (or few) vms to new repositories, preserving the existing restore points for such vms.

How is this possible? And, does it matter whether the backup files are "per-vm" or not?

[Vitaliy S.]

If backup chains are not using a "per-VM" option, then you would not be able to move backup chains of some VMs, while keeping other VMs in the original repository. How many jobs do you have pointed to these repositories? Moving the entire job might be much easier, than trying to split the existing ones and then re-map all the backups.

[Moebius]

It is just one backup copy job (with several backup jobs as sources).
Assuming that the chains are per-VM, what would the correct procedure for moving some chains be?

[Vitaliy S.]

In this case you would need to copy the entire backup chain to the new repository, map the new backup copy job to these files and then remove unnecessary VMs from the backup file/job. The same should be done for the existing backup copy job: need to remove the VMs you've migrated to the new job/repository.

On a side note, it is highly recommended to use capacity planning for backup repositories reports of Veeam ONE to avoid these situations in future.

[Moebius]

Ok, maybe I'm missing something here.

I did a test and copied the vbk and all vibs for one VM to another repository. Then I imported the backup and all worked fine. I can see in the "Imported" backups the whole chain of that vm. I even did a test restore, picking one random restore point of the chain - all fine.

Then I created a new backup copy job for that VM and mapped it to the imported job. I got to the point where B&R asks if I wanted to un-map the VM from the "old" backup copy job and map it to this new one. Being only a test I canceled at this point, but everything seemed pretty smooth.

So, are there any reasons why I cannot do just this to move one or more chains to another repository, instead of following the method you indicated (which would mean having a new repo available with at least as much free space as the size of the one that is full)?

[Vitaliy S.]

I might have worded that wrong, but you followed all the steps that I highlighted above

1. Move the backup chain (imported backup or new repository does not matter)
2. Create a new backup copy job and map it the backup files.

[Moebius]

Vitaliy, thank you. I guess I misunderstood then. I had thought that with "copy the entire backup chain to the new repository" you meant copying the entire backup (all chains, all vms). Now it makes perfect sense.