Only ONE restore point per rotated drive - why Veeam makes it so hard?

[dk-one]

Simple scenario: I wanna have only ONE restore point per rotated drive (external USB drive).

Simple question: why Veeam makes it so hard to get this scenario?

When I tell the retentions policy in the backup job to keep ONE restore point only per rotated drives, why I've then to confiure registry settings or create scripts? Backup and replication isn't cheap, why refusing this comfort by just clicking a check mark?

Would anyone of Veeam explain this to me?

[Gostev]

Because it's not a typical use case. We can't have a check box for every possible scenario without making the UI a mess, so we focus on those scenarios that most of our customers are using. This approach also implicitly guides less experience users to do what most of their peer are doing. As some other use cases become popular and result in many similar feature requests, they also make their away into the UI... but we don't do it preemptively.

What do you find "so hard" about creating a registry value?

[dk-one]

Ok, I tried it with the registry settingbut it won't work.

Given I: Regular backup chain from Tue to Sat every week. GFS backup scheme. Tue to Fri incremental, Sat active full to NAS - works
Given II: Active full on Sun, encrypted, NO backup jobs as weekly backups are unencrypted but the active on Sun is encrypted to USB drive - doesn't work.

The active full encrypted task starts weekly on Sun to the USB drive. I tried both: retention time 7 days and restore points 1. But the task isn't deleting the old active full backup.

Then I created a batch file which will delete al *.vbk files on the USB drive. It won't work as the access to the USB don't use the credentials from the Veeam task but the access data to the USB drive which are different. So I can't run the batch under the account which is accessing the USB drive.

Another chance. Set the registry setting ForceDeleteBackupFiles to 3. But then the task doesn't start as it says Error in the application.

Again, HOW do I get a single active full backup task to an external USB drive? And no, there's not enough space for a 2nd backup file.

[soncscy]

Hi dk-one,

> Another chance. Set the registry setting ForceDeleteBackupFiles to 3. But then the task doesn't start as it says Error in the application.

That sounds like just something to be investigated as to why the error appeared. I don't think it's some inherent limitation (errors are just that, errors).

Probably, you need a support case to figure out what this error was.

I did a quick dummy test in our lab with the same registry value, and it was without incident, so I think the answer is figure out why there was an error.

[babine]

Hi,

I need to create a job to make a fullbackup of my VMs on an external drive.
I want to keep only one restore point and make at each run an fullbackup.

The idea is to make a "cold" backup.

What is the best solution to do it ?

Thank you

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums. I merged your question to one of the existing topics with the same question.

Workarounds for today are provided above.

Best regards,
Hannes