Understanding copy jobs (#00626465)

[dtwiley]

Hi,

I've been using Veeam for a while but only recently implemented environments with backup copies. I've read most of the documentation and cannot find an explanation of how Backup Copy restore points are generated.

If I'm backing up to a local repository multiple times a day (incremental's with full at the weekend) with a backup copy job attached to it which is set to copy to remote storage, I've restricted it to run 8pm to 7am to stop it consuming production WAN bandwidth. The copy job is restarting daily at midnight.

What I'm seeing is 3 local full restore points but just one per day on the copy job. The documentation suggests that it'll only copy the most recent full backup which is annoying as I want to duplicate all of the days restore points not the last one. I can change the copy job to run more frequently but they'll time out as I've got a restricted window available for replication.

From some forum reading elsewhere it seems that this is by design as the copy job will merge incrementals when copying to create an accurate restore point on the copy (nobody has been able to confirm this).

To summarise:
Backup a server to local repository @ 11am, 3pm and 10pm.
Copy job running daily (window set to 8pm - 7am)
Results for 1 day are 3 restore points locally, 1 restore point remotely

How can I get all 3 restore points copied with my restricted copy window?

Dave

[veremin]

You're right, the backup copy job doesn't t copy backup file as a whole, but rather synthetically creates required restore points in "target" location from VM data in source backup repositories. So, the number of restore points the source backup job has shouldn't coincide with the number of restore points of backup copy job, as everything depends on specified "Copy interval", which, in general, tells the backup copy job how often its restore points should be created.

In your case, you may want to use "old-school" method of using Robocopy and other scripts to push data to a remote location. However, may be instead of completely disabling given job during the said interval you use throttling rules, so that, backup copy job doesn't saturate the full bandwidth. Then, you can set more frequent schedule for the backup copy job and let it recreate your source chain.

Thanks.

[dtwiley]

Thanks, the synthetic copy explains it for me. I thought about throttling the copy job but it also needs to copy out of hours when I need it to run at full speed.

The product really needs a throttling schedule where we can set different speeds depending on the time of day. The WAN link is 100Mbit so i'm happy to use 50mbit during the day but want 100mbit out of hours as nobody is using it

[veremin]

The product really needs a throttling schedule where we can set different speeds depending on the time of day. The WAN link is 100Mbit so i'm happy to use 50mbit during the day but want 100mbit out of hours as nobody is using it

We seem to have that functionality already. Go to "throttling rules" tab, and input IP range, specify required throttling rule and select time interval during which a rule should take place. Isn't that what you're after? Thanks.

[dtwiley]

The throttling settings apply to proxies, I thought proxies were only used during backup tasks, not backup copy tasks? If they are used then this will solve my problem, can you clarify, thanks

[foggy]

Throttling rules apply to any Veeam data mover agents (including those installed on backup repositories).

[dtwiley]

Nice one thanks, that'll do it, I've just set it up to use half my available bandwidth.

What a great product, if I can imagine it, it can do it... ...let me keep imagining.

[veremin]

And if you want to have different throttling during the day, select required range and create multiple rules for it (say, from 1 to 6 pm - throttling 50 MBit, and 100 MBit for the rest of the day). Thanks.

[dtwiley]

that's exactly what I did, waiting for my 1pm backup to run and then see how the copy job performs with 50mbit throttling.

[veremin]

Great! Let us know how well it goes.

[dtwiley]

its working as expected now thanks, the 1pm backup job just finished and now its doing the copy at 50Mbps)