start time of synthetic fulls and transformations

[jwwags92]

Hi there,

Total newbie here.

When a transform operation needs to take place.. it does this as a post-process of a normal backup? So if I have a backup that runs at 5pm everyday, but wanted to do this earlier for a Saturday backup when it has to do this transform.. I can't do this right?

I had a 12+ hour transform operation recently. ( all actual incremental backups were completed ) I noticed that Even though it was 90% completed and working on the final transform operation of a huge vm.. I couldn't do a restore on any other vm's in the group. All the vmdks were locked. Is this normal? I didn't try this, but would I have been able to do a restore for a vm in a different backup group? I'm wondering if this is a reason to keep my groups to a smaller number of vm's. ( so a long transform doesn't keep me from being able to restore a huge pile of vm's )

thanks for comments.

[dellock6]

Hi Jason,
two things:
- yes transform starts at the end of the backup process, once all VMs have been processed and no more snapshots are open in the production environment. You cannot specify a different start time for a given day, also because the transform is daily and not weekly (unless we are talking about the synthetic full and not the transform of a chain)
- the lock behaviour is expected, but you can solve it by moving to per-vm backup chains:
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/backup/vsp ... files.html
Instead of a single backup file per job, you have one file per VM, and the transform locks only the involved file/VM, every other vm is unlocked and you can do restores for any vm that has the transform already completed.

Luca