USB disk rotation with Veeam Agent for Windows

Hi ​@JC-29 -

Is there a reason why you aren’t using the “main” Veeam Backup solution to backup your Hyper-V VMs? You didn’t share much about your environment, but it appears you may have a small environment? You can use the VBR Community Edition (free) version to backup up to 10 VMs.

Can you share more of what your backup goal is? We can then better assist.

Thanks.

Hello!
It sounds like you're rotating USB disks, but it's not fully clear how your rotation strategy works.

Drive letter changes are a common cause of failure in this setup. You may want to use a persistent drive letter or a volume GUID path to avoid this issue.

Yes you are good to leave the USB drive connected for backups.  You registered it as a target so all should be good just space will become an issue based on retention.

Hi all, and thanks for the replies.

My setup is one HyperV host and one VM to protect.  I did start with the community edition of VBR, but I also couldn’t see how I could make that work with 2 USB disks that have different drive letters.

The customer is likely to only swap the USBs if they are in the office.  This doesn’t always happen.  The VM to be protected is about 900GB and the USBs are 4TB each.  I’ve currently setup 7 days retention and will see how much of the 4TB gets used. 

A thought did cross my mind of setting a scheduled task/script to do a diskpart change/assign drive letter to E: ten minutes before the Veeam job runs.  

Thanks v much!

Oh, ok...yeah, that works ​@JC-29 . Running a scheduled task before the VAW job would certainly be beneficial imo to make sure your drive gets “seen”.

Also...I assume you did read in the Guide how rotated drives operate?
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agentforwindows/userguide/rotated_drives.html?ver=13

Let us know how it goes.

Best.

Sounds like you have a good plan and time will tell if things work.  Let us know how it goes.