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foggy
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Re: Rotated hard drives support in v8

Post by foggy »

What kind of repository it is targeted at? And what Veeam B&R version you're running?
JeremyWJ
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Re: Rotated hard drives support in v8

Post by JeremyWJ »

9.0. Backup copy job using 5 external usb hard drives. One drive for each weekday. The plan is to switch them each day to have offline backups. Due to this, they always need to be incremental to complete in time.
foggy
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Re: Rotated hard drives support in v8

Post by foggy »

I'd suggest to review your setup with the help of support, since the behavior is not expected for the Windows repository with rotated drives support enabled.
souperstar
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Re: Rotated hard drives support in v8

Post by souperstar »

JeremyWJ, I've had the same issue for years. I think you'll find there is no good answer for this, there simply isn't a good way to do what we're asking.

Currently, this is my setup:
Dell R730xd chassis
12 core Intel ED-2680 v3 CPU
32GB RAM
Server 2012 R2
FC HBA for a direct connection to our SAN fabric
2x SSD in RAID1 for OS and programs
12x SSD in RAID5 for local backup repository (I need to buy more... I'm not backing up anywhere close to the entire environment, just the most critical data)
3x backup disks in a direct attached chassis

With this, I'm able to chain backup jobs from production storage to the SSD repo (yes I know Veeam doesn't like job chaining, but it kept me from decimating my production SAN - which is now all flash so I could revisit this). As soon as a job is done, I use a post-job robocopy script to copy the full backup file to a disk. Rinse and repeat for several more jobs and each disk. With this setup, I'm actually able to copy about 9TB compressed and deduped data from the local SSD repo the rotated disks daily. What makes this work is the SSD repo - it can handle the IO for creating the incrementals, and I can keep writing backup jobs while copying to the rotated disk(s). While the jobs are running, the server is will 1GB/sec of combined reading and writing, until the wee hours of the morning.

I've tried doing multiple things over the years to get daily backups to removable disks with Veeam, including:
- Creating a separate job for every disk so backup metadata would be intact and the reverse incremental would work. But my rotated disks only get touched once a week, and some only once a month. So in a week's time my deltas were far too big to complete overnight. I haven't retried this with the "forever incremental" that was somewhat recently released, but I expect nearly the same results.
- Creating Backup Copy Jobs to copy from the local repo to the removable disks...but these jobs and their logic simply weren't designed for this use case so I would strongly urge you not even try this. Very frustrated on this one, I thought it was going to be the answer.
- Creating separate jobs, one each for the local repo and removable disks. To be honest I never actually did this in production primarily because I didn't want to touch production storage more than once.
- Created several support tickets asking for advice on how to accomplish it. Several forum threads (heck, you'll even see my posts in this thread).

In my case, I was able to throw money at it and alleviate the issue. I can't use the cloud, but if you can I would urge you to see if you could a cloud repo for replication and kick off offline backups from the replicated repo. It'll require a decent cloud partner. For us, our colo replications are completely separate from Veeam, but they're also not backups and definitely not offline backups.

If you ever figure out a way to do it, I'm more than interested.
LukedElwood
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Re: Rotated hard drives support in v8

Post by LukedElwood »

Jeremy we have had the same issue. started with 9.0. we were told by tier one that it was intentional an Veeam does not support incrementals on rotated disk starting with version 9. Since then we have been told the tier one was not correct and it is supported, but after 5 months (we opened the ticket July 1st) all we get is automated messages, or responses that they are working on it followed by notice that the case is closed. We have complained all over the place with no resolution.
foggy
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Re: Rotated hard drives support in v8

Post by foggy »

Luke, could you please share your case ID? Thanks.
BlueComp
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Re: Rotated hard drives support in v8

Post by BlueComp »

I'm also having trouble with rotated media.

Is it true that Veeam considers the whole set of drives as one repository, and therefore will not create an incremental chain on each disk?

We are using 5 disks, monday - friday, and the expected / desired result is 1 full and multiple incrementals on each disk. However we find it is creating a full VBK each time, which causes capacity issues for us. Is there any roadmap to support one chain per disk for a single job with rotated media? I understand that with backup copy jobs this shoud work OK, but not a backup job targetted at rotated USB disks.

Any way we can get just the initial full and then incrementals on each disk?
foggy
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Re: Rotated hard drives support in v8

Post by foggy »

It is not possible to maintain an incremental chain on each rotated drive for the backup jobs, however, retention should work (in case of Windows repository), so if your drives have space for at least two fulls, you can configure less restore points to keep on each of them.
BlueComp
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Re: Rotated hard drives support in v8

Post by BlueComp »

So with rotated media all backups will be fulls?

But if I use a backup copy job then Veeam can create a consistent incremental chain on each drive? ie. each drive will have one full and relevant incrementals as per retention policy?
foggy
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Re: Rotated hard drives support in v8

Post by foggy »

Any backup performed by the backup job right after the disk is swapped will be full.
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