Offsite Backup Copy jobs in Ver 12

[isoaclue]

Well just throwing my hat into the mix of people who are more than a little miffed at this significant change not getting more up front acknowledgement. I'm not used to losing such useful things in an upgrade and it sounds like from the above the EARLIEST we might see it come back is in Veeam 13 and even that's not assured. Frankly, this has me questioning if Veeam is still the right solution for us. Misreading the room this hard means you're not paying attention to how your customers are using your product, I think I need to go another direction before I get sideswiped by yet another "upgrade." This needs to be fixed in the current version.

[stevehughes]

The last post from Dima P. (who is aparrently the owner of this feature) was back in February. Surely he can't still be on vacation? Could we have an update please?

Steve.

[Dima P.]

Hello folks,

Just to make sure we are on the same page: the functionality run backup copy from backup copy source is supported however it requires legacy backup copy jobs to have such setup before you upgrade to v12, so if you already have such configuration you can continue to use pre-v12 jobs without any worries. I'll look into possible workarounds (say creating old backup copy jobs via PowerShell) and post the update here as soon as I can.

We fully understand the need of this functionality in new backup copy job engine and this functionality is already planned. Thank you!

[DaStivi]

Hey there, thx to Herbert szumovski who linked me the thread, i am in the same boat...

It's ah really common feature... Had luck that until now that it's just one customer that does bcj of bcj's into my veeam Cloud-Connect SP Environment...

I was really eager to push him to v12 with all the other good features to just suddenly noticed what I've done.. i still had luck to not upgrade the primary chains as I just read here...

Here's my post , at least for whom has access to SP parts of the forum...
cloud-connect-backup-f43/new-v12-backup ... 87807.html

But basically the same story and why this was ah good feature

[BobseyH]

Any progress with Backup Copy of a Backup Copy Job?
We have a customer who could really benefit from having this capability back in V12.
It's a VBR/VDRO setup, so stepping back to V11 is a huge amount of work! Effectively redeploy the whole lot. 3 sites, with ExaGrid and Block SOBR's, loads of Proxy's, Tape Libarys and so on!
They had some Veeam Training where they were told it was possible, only to discover in V12 it is not !

[Dima P.]

Hello Bob,

Sorry to hear that you were told this functionality was included in v12. We are working on a solution but for now I cant share any ETA. Thank you!

[Henrik.Grevelund]

Hi,

Will this be possible in version 12a ?

[Neturius]

Just to add another comment: Making copies of copies on offsite repositories is a standard setup for many of our customers. This is mainly to reduce WAN traffic and move the traffic out of business hours. Fortunatly I found this threat by coincident, looking to solve other issues with the new copy jobs, before updating a site where copying from a distinct source is mandatory. Even if old copy jobs continue to work this is not acceptable as it freezes the setup anbd we have no chance to add new jobs when required.

This is a show stopper for us. I can not understand why features are removed in a version upgrade without providing another way to get the same or better result. And now after some month of customers complaining we do not even have an ETA for this feature to come back and no workaround.

Please Veeam, rethink your policy!

Regards,
Peter

[Gostev]

It was not a planned removal: R&D just did not have enough time to port all existing functionality back to the newly redesigned universal Backup Copy engine in time for V12 release. While holding a major release over a few such features is never an option for us.

[vscardigli]

Good afternoon,

We need this feature too... Is there a release date for the patch ?

Thank you

[Mildur]

Hello Vincent

Welcome to the forum.
Please see the previous comments. There is no ETA yet.
Also I want to mention it won't be delivered as a patch. Patches fixes issues and do not add functionality.

Best,
Fabian

[Gostev]

Well, maybe we make an exception this time. But no timelines yet as there are no QA resources to ship it in 12a itself for sure.

[enrique.suarez]

Hi,

Backup Copy from another backup copy job was one of the reasons to install Veaam Backup&Replication in our company; it allows to distribute backups without transfering data twice from production/remote sites.

I can't understand why Veeam decides to REMOVE an already existing feature without giving other alternatives.
It was one USEFUL feature.

And there is not any advice about this decission in Veeam Documentation (at least I could not find it)

[Gostev]

Hi, your question has already been asked and answered just a few posts above, so I suggest we don't keep beating a dead horse by repeatedly asking the same exact question (this is more for future posters too). We would really appreciate it... thank you all in advance.

The fact that this change is not documented anywhere (if true) is however unacceptable and is something responsible PMs need to watch out for in future. Although I was under impression there's a corresponding warning logged during V12 upgrade wizard, as there are dozens of checks on other deprecated or removed functionality.

[Tic]

Hi,

It would be great if this removed feature came back. No ETA yet?

[Dima P.]

Hello Tic,

The functionality to create backup copy job from backup copy job as a source is in the short term plans but we cannot share the exact time frame yet. Thank you!

[vchris]

Hi, your question has already been asked and answered just a few posts above, so I suggest we don't keep beating a dead horse by repeatedly asking the same exact question (this is more for future posters too). We would really appreciate it... thank you all in advance.

The fact that this change is not documented anywhere (if true) is however unacceptable and is something responsible PMs need to watch out for in future. Although I was under impression there's a corresponding warning logged during V12 upgrade wizard, as there are dozens of checks on other deprecated or removed functionality.

Hi Gostev,

Here are the warning messages obtained during the upgrade:

[Warning] Improved Backup Copy jobs
1. In V12, newly created Backup Copy jobs are no longer platform-specific and can contain a mix of different workload types. Further, you can perform additional management operations on backups created by new Backup Copy jobs.
2. Legacy Backup Copy jobs will continue to operate normally in V12 but should be upgraded at your earliest convenience.

It doesn't indicate that the selection/source cannot be another Backup Copy job. It even trends to indicate that it will be better "Further...." (It's not really a precise indication for a warning message.)

And the warning above comes from a customer that had more than 20 "Copy of Copy" jobs.

Into the helpcenter, https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120, we have a note at the end of the page:

NOTE
You can not use backups created by a backup copy job as a source for another backup copy job.

Ok it's there. But that's a major feature change (at least for our designs and customers), it should be warned accordingly during update / What's new blog posts / PM. We can't be expected to read 100% of the Help Center, I like Veeam but i have limited time too

Reading:

It was not a planned removal: R&D just did not have enough time to port all existing functionality back to the newly redesigned universal Backup Copy engine in time for V12 release. While holding a major release over a few such features is never an option for us.

Yeah, it's hurt a bit, we planned and design solutions, we sold Veeam on these features as they were the differentiators. Designs and best practices evolved, but customer implemented years ago are working with theses. "Big bang" design change isn't that simple on large customers.
I understand the "We must deliver major release", but keeping the legacy and having smooth lifecycle is one of Veeam argument too.

We don't have a lot of customers using a copy of a copy, we use/push the SOBR multi tiering feature with S3 Geocluster and immutability every time we can, but the few without objects (mostly large enterprise Veeam Early adopters) are highly impacted by that.

Multinational companies bringing back the data from ROBO (1st copy short retention) to the HQ SOBR (2nd copy short retention, enabling central tape out for long term archive) and then copying it a second time from HQ SOBR to another deduplication appliance (3rd copy GFS retention 6 months). The copy from the copy was enabling a single data move from the really low bandwidth ROBOs, about 15, to the HQ. Now we have to copy it 2 times. We have solutions/workaround, but the V12 update and design transition wasn't smooth. We lost some points.

So not beating a dead horse, more telling the battle horse: Speak louder about that next time please

Have a great day

[Dima P.]

Hello vChris,

Thank you for your comments and feedback! Together with Technical Writes team we've stated a discussion how we can keep all 'what's changed' together in one place to help you understand changes brought by a newer version. We plan to keep it next to our Upgrade check list, but as a dedicated chapter. Will such article help you and your customers?

[ITP-Stan]

A Breaking Changes section in the release notes would be a good idea.

[BackupBytesTim]

So this doesn't actually directly impact us at all, none of our customers had any applicable backup copy jobs from backup copy jobs, but I'm curious as someone with development experience, and just generally trying to understand more about how the software works.

Why is "backup copy jobs from backup copies" not a thing? If we can still do backup copy jobs from original backups, what's different about doing it from a backup copy? It seems if I had a backup file, I could copy it somewhere. Why can I not then copy the copy? It seems like the only thing missing is simply the ability to select a copy as a source for the copy job, it doesn't seem like there's anything actually different about the copy operation itself that would result in this still not being a thing even several months after it was removed and determined it should be added back to the software.

[Gostev]

It IS a thing - at least was a thing. Just had to be dropped from V12 due to major architectural changes of Backup Copy jobs causing issues in this particular scenario, which from Dev/QA perspective were too late to fix in the remaining time before the RTM. And because from support big data we know that very few installations are actually using this capability, it was not a hard decision.

[enigma361]

Will the feature "backup copy of backup copy" be brought back in v12.1?

[Gostev]

No, it was eventually postponed from 12.1 due to issues found in the initial testing and considering the remaining time to 12.1 release (not enough to stabilize). So the code is there in 12.1 but the feature is disabled. The idea now is to come back to this post-12.1 and enable the functionality in one of the 12.1 patches, when QA is comfortable that it's ready for production use.

[vchris]

Hello vChris,

Thank you for your comments and feedback! Together with Technical Writes team we've stated a discussion how we can keep all 'what's changed' together in one place to help you understand changes brought by a newer version. We plan to keep it next to our Upgrade check list, but as a dedicated chapter. Will such article help you and your customers?

Hi,

Yes the note "hidden"

You can not use backups created by a backup copy job as a source for another backup copy job

into the helpcenter should be present near the upgrade check list, as a strong warning. It would help a lot. As for any feature dropped.

Thanks Dima

[nqrott]

Any news on this case? We have 3 customers having that issue, 2 more will follow til end of november.

[Dima P.]

Hello nqrott,

This functionality is planned but post 12.1 release. We are working on a code base now and the plan is to deliver the ability to create backup copy from backup for vm backup as soon as we can. Thank you!

[trackstar]

We are running Veeam Backup & Replication 11 (11.0.1.1261 P20230027) and use backup copy jobs heavily for offsite. I just noticed version 12.1 has just been released. Does the support the feature? Also will my configuration and jobs from backup copy job be carried over?


Thanks,
TT

[Dima P.]

Hello TT,

Backup copy with backup copy jobs as a source feature is not included in 12.1. This functionality is already developed, so we plan to ship it as soon as possible with the next most suitable release vehicle. Thank you!

[trackstar]

Dima,

Just to clarify what I said on the post before. Basically in our environment, the backup jobs are written to a local drive (E:). Then during the daytime when "Backup" of the VMs from the vCenter are not running, the "Backup Copy" runs the job (where it copies the files from E drive to the F drive). The F drive is the ISCSI drive (AWS) mounted as a local drive.

So you are saying as of right now, 12.1 doesn't have that feature.

[Dima P.]

No, I was referring to the functionality of creating backup copy job with another backup copy job added as a source. There are not limitations for backup copy with primary jobs being added to the source, so your case is completely covered with latest version.