Case # 01786791 - Drive rotation issue

[VeaamGuy]

Hi,

We have a simple requirement that Veeam should backup to a new drive on the 1st day of the month. In the past when we had shadowprotect, we had a simple windows script to swap over the drive letters after formatting the previous months data and that worked seamlessly. For example, we are now in May so on 1st of June:
1. The drive holding the backups for the whole of May will be changed from say v: to something random e.g. z:
2. The drive holding the backups for the month of April (say its w:) will be formatted first and then its letter changed to v: to make it ready to backup stuff for June
3. The temporaory z: will now be changed to w: and become the archive drive which holds the backup for the last month.
Now a tape backup job via Symantec backup exec will run to backup the w: to tape.

We tried doing this with Veeam using the rotated drives option turned on for the current repository which points to v: but the repository ends up updating itself and pointing to the w: after the drive update script runs on the windows side i.e. its following the drive on change of drive letters and this is making things a bit harder.

In the end as a work around, we had to manually force the drive having the current months backup to be offline.
Then bring the new drive with no data to be online and with drive letter v:
After that when we ran the backups it seemed to be stuck in pending state for a very long time followed by the backups finally kicking off (maybe it was clearing the backup chain for the whole of last month and seemed to be stuck). Support is not looking into it as they say its not a supported scenario!!
But if anyone out there is using Veeam in a similar way and has some windows/Veeam script to have it working seamlessly without any issues, please let us know what was it that worked.

PS once the backup ran, we brought the old Veeam drive back online as w: and the repo stayed as v: which was good as the tape backups could continue after that even though it got delayed quite a bit.

Instead of the rotated backup drives, is there an option in Veeam or in the registry which you can enable by which if Veeam doesn't see the old backup chain it starts off with a new one? If yes we can enable that and turn off the rotated drive option. As per Veeam support the repo is updating itself to the new drive letter due to the rotated drive option being turned on.
Alternatively if the job setup had an option to allow backup to different drives at the start of the month for example that would be awesome. Maybe another future improvement that can be done but wont be requested as not many people wanting it now but using it a lot if it ever gets released as its always handy to have a previous backup online (rather than on tapes) for quick restore.

Thanks in advance.

[foggy]

Correct, in case of Windows type repository, Veeam B&R follows the drive on the letter change. If you want to avoid that, re-add your drive as CIFS repository, then your initial approach should work with the rotated drives option (this type of repo is not able to track drive letter changes).

[VeaamGuy]

Hi Alexander,
Thanks for the suggestion, we were previously using CIFS repository but there were performance issues and Veeam support suggested using Windows type repository as they are much faster.
Also I was told by Veeam support that it is following the drive on change of letter due to having the rotated drives option turned on for the repository. Will the following of drive happen even if rotated drives option is turned off?

[alanbolte]

It won't follow the drive, but it'll fail if it can't find files because you changed out the drive.

While CIFS certainly can be slower, did switching to Windows actually improve performance?