Rotated Drives

[hackerman9001]

I have a Hyper-V Server hosting VMs to be backed up, and another server as a backup server and repository. I'd like to do offsite backups but due to slow internet speed I won't be able to do that. Instead I'd like to use rotated drives which get connected weekly then moved offsite. I'm not on site to do this each week, so I'd like to be able to automate this as much as possible and train someone to plug in a drive, wait for some indication then take it off site. Obviously I'd rather people not go poking USB drives into my main backup server/repository, so instead I'd like to put a PC somewhere accessible for the drive to be plugged in.

How would I go about setting this up to detect when a drive is plugged in and start a backup? Is there a way to determine when a backup is complete so I can eject the drive and show some sort of message?

Thanks!

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi there!

- attach said disk to the "plug" machine, allocate a letter(say, Z:)
- add your accessible "plug" machine to Veeam as Backup Repository. I guess that would be some Windows workstation in the office? Use "Windows" repository type(Z:\Backups) and make sure to tick "[X] This repository is backed by rotated drives" here.
- set your backup job to target said repository
- now to trigger the job you have several options: 1) Automated by Schedule - say in the night of Day X when drives supposed to be switched. If user switches the drive, its cool, we go with 2nd drive. If user forgets to switch, you gonna have 1 more incremental backup on same disk and punish user in the morning. When backup completes we can send email to required users - you can edit "Subject" field and set it to like "Backup XXXX completed. Take off USB Drive NOW!" 2) Manual trigger - if you trust that user to trigger the job, it takes a script on desktop to click to initiate Start-VBRJob commandlet. Same with notifications on completion - automated by Veeam or scripted. 3) Automated scripted - you can have a script on said "plug" server that will detect presence of a particular drive followed by job start command. It can also auto-eject said drive upon completion.

Hope that helps!

[oleg.feoktistov]

Hi @hackerman9001,

Adding to Egor's advice, I believe it could be also helpful for your colleague to actually know that the job has been started without accessing VBR console.
You can approach it by instructing Task Scheduler to listen to 110 event on VBR server and send an email upon its occurrence.
Here is an example of XPath query to filter out needed events for a task trigger:

Code: Select all

<QueryList>
  <Query Id="0" Path="Veeam Backup">
    <Select Path="Veeam Backup">*[System[(EventID=110)]] and *[EventData[Data and Data="Backup job 'BackupJobName' has been started."]]</Select>
  </Query>
</QueryList>

You can find the list of all job-related VBR events here.

Thanks,
Oleg