Double licensing with file to tape/NAS jobs?

[William Bohn]

Hello, I am wondering if it is by design to have licensing of fileshares count once for NAS jobs and then the same fileshares that have tape jobs get counted again against your total licenses?

There is no way to put NAS jobs to tape so they have to be different jobs unless I am missing something?
Is there a way to configure so they do not get counted twice?

thanks

[Mildur]

Hi william

Using two file backup jobs to protect the same fileshare will costs you double amount of licenses. This is documented in our user guide.

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120

There is no way to put NAS jobs to tape so they have to be different jobs unless I am missing something?

Veeam Backup & Replication V12 allows you to write Nas backups from Disk to Tape.
You can use a Backup to Tape job. In that case, you only require to license the fileshare backup job to disk. The tape job won‘t cost you an additional license.

Best,
Fabian

[William Bohn]

Right, but what are you actually backing up from the NAS job to tape? Isn't that object oriented and full of pointers? Not linear?

[Gostev]

What goes to tape is the same as if you were to back up directly from a file share [that is protected by the NAS job].
(sorry, not sure what you mean by your terminology there)

[William Bohn]

I thought the NAS jobs for file shares are a different technology method than a file to tape job.
If a tape is linear how can it pull a file from a NAS backup unless you are mounting the whole backup first?

I haven't read the documents since v11 and I thought that is what it said. Did things change in v12 or it wasn't clear to me from the beginning.

If there is a step by step explanation for copying NAS jobs to tape and then how to restore a file that would be great.

thanks

[Gostev]

You can think of it as "mounting the whole backup first" if it's easier, although there's no such notion outside of image-level backups. Only with the latter we need to mount a disk image from backup to an OS that "understands" a file system inside of the image. While NAS backup is a file-level backup by definition and we can just read those files directly from our backup.

As for an explanation I suggest you refer to the User Guide.

[William Bohn]

Thank you for walking me through this. Yes I was having trouble wrapping my head around how it was going to put the files onto tape from a NAS backup but it does do this magically on the fly using the NAS backup as a source. That should clear out the double license issue once I create new jobs using the backups and delete the file-to-tape jobs.

I turned off incremental backups for the tape job and to only use full, just in case, since the link you posted said it would check and do a full if needed.
My test worked great.