Skip to main content
  • EN

Hi,

I am using the free Windows Agent program.  I have two 4TB external drives that I want to use for backups.  I don’t know if this can be done, but this is what I’m envisioning:

Drive A is in my house.  Drive B is off-site.

I connect Drive A to my laptop and kick off a full backup.  Every couple days, I reconnect Drive A and run another backup (incremental).  At the start of the next month I will go swap Drive A and Drive B.

When I connect Drive B, I want to run another Full backup.  Then every few days I run an incremental.  At the start of the next month I swap drives again.

At this point, I want to treat it as a new chain of backups and start with a Full and then go to incremental.  As long as the drive isn’t full, I don’t want to ever delete backups just because they are “old”.  Can any/all of this be automated with the Free Agent for Windows program?  Is there a better way to handle this whole thing?

Just looking for advice for this whole process.

Thanks!

Yes this would work because when you connect Drive B it would not see the previous chain and run a Full backup regardless.  So swapping will work but each time you swap a full is run.

You can configure your backup to use rotated drives. You can find more information on how to configure that here:

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agentforwindows/userguide/rotated_drives.html?ver=60

You can configure your backup to use rotated drives. You can find more information on how to configure that here:

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agentforwindows/userguide/rotated_drives.html?ver=60

Can you expound on Step 3 where it says:

After you swap drives again, Veeam Agent detects if there is a backup chain on the currently attached drive. If the backup chain exists, Veeam Agent continues the existing chain: it creates a new incremental backup file and adds it to the existing backup files.

If I swap Drive A out, and then a month later swap it back in, there IS a backup chain on the drive, but I don’t want to use it since it’s 30 days old.  Does it only keep track of the most recent chain so it wouldn’t detect the old chain as relevant and would treat it as not having a chain?

Great question ​@Kelemvor Veeam Agent for Windows does support rotated drives, but it’s key to configure the backup job with the rotated drive option enabled. Also, make sure each drive is recognized consistently using the same path or volume label helps. Thanks ​@Chris.Childerhose for the KB link, very useful!

You can configure your backup to use rotated drives. You can find more information on how to configure that here:

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agentforwindows/userguide/rotated_drives.html?ver=60

Can you expound on Step 3 where it says:

After you swap drives again, Veeam Agent detects if there is a backup chain on the currently attached drive. If the backup chain exists, Veeam Agent continues the existing chain: it creates a new incremental backup file and adds it to the existing backup files.

If I swap Drive A out, and then a month later swap it back in, there IS a backup chain on the drive, but I don’t want to use it since it’s 30 days old.  Does it only keep track of the most recent chain so it wouldn’t detect the old chain as relevant and would treat it as not having a chain?

I believe it keeps track of all chains when using rotating drives so would continue the chain.  You would probably need to force a new full to get a new chain started.

You can configure your backup to use rotated drives. You can find more information on how to configure that here:

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agentforwindows/userguide/rotated_drives.html?ver=60

Can you expound on Step 3 where it says:

After you swap drives again, Veeam Agent detects if there is a backup chain on the currently attached drive. If the backup chain exists, Veeam Agent continues the existing chain: it creates a new incremental backup file and adds it to the existing backup files.

If I swap Drive A out, and then a month later swap it back in, there IS a backup chain on the drive, but I don’t want to use it since it’s 30 days old.  Does it only keep track of the most recent chain so it wouldn’t detect the old chain as relevant and would treat it as not having a chain?

I believe it keeps track of all chains when using rotating drives so would continue the chain.  You would probably need to force a new full to get a new chain started.

I totally agree with ​@Chris.Childerhose here since Veeam does not discard the chain because it is old.

Comment


Terms & Conditions