mea culpa - self replication problem

[bill101b]

I admit it. I missed the line in the release notes that said: "Virtualized Veeam Backup server cannot backup, replicate or copy itself with jobs using vStorage API “Virtual Appliance” mode". I tried to replicate our Veeam server and proved that what Gostev has said: "With any backup mode, Veeam Backup would freeze itself during the snapshot creation and will not be able to complete the required operations".

So I'm trying to clean up my mess. I had to power off the Veeam server VM and when it came back up it had been reconfigured with an independent, non-persistent disk. Unfortunately, I didn't realize this until after a days worth of backups - backups that got written to the destination disk but no persistent record got written to the server's local SQL database. So the situation I face now has the data on the destination disk out of sync with the local database. I haven't run any backups because I don't want to further mess things up.

I'm writing here because the Veeam support person is very slow to respond and doesn't seem to understand that looking at the nonexistent (non-persistent) logs files from our "lost weekend" aren't going to help.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[bill101b]

We are running Veeam Backup and Replication 4.1.1

[Gostev]

Hi Bill, I would:
1. Preserve current backups elsewhere (in case you need to restore from current backups, you will be able to do this via "Import Backup")
2. Reinstall or clean up Veeam Backup:
a) Delete all jobs from UI
b) Delete all backups from UI (via Remove from Disk on backup)
c) Manually cleanup datastore then create new backup jobs,
3. Create new backup jobs and run them.
Hope this helps!

[bill101b]

That's what I was afraid of, Gostev. I couldn't see any way of re-sync-ing the database with the backup files. I doubt that the "magic" of creating synthetic backups could withstand even a hint of database corruption. I'll preserve the old datastore and create a new Veeam server, new jobs, new datastore and start again... sadder but wiser. Maybe RTFM next time.

Thanks for the prompt and helpful response (still nothing from Veeam support).

[Gostev]

If you have remote SQL, you may want to consider placing Veeam database server there... this way Veeam Backup VM server loss or corruption will not cause any issues.

Interesting though that your Veeam Backup server was working "fine" (more or less) processing itself in the Virtual Appliance mode... in our v4 testing it used to simply crash in attempt to hot add own disks.