Need to append data to existing tapes

[rreed]

Afternoon everyone. Getting our feet wet w/ tape backup in Veeam v8; in short I have a media pool w/ 1-year retention, add tapes as needed from the free pool. As backups to tape have been running, tape A (LTO-6 2.3TB) gets a few hundred GB written to it leaving 2.0TB free. Following weekend another job runs, using tape B. That tape is left w/ 1.6TB free. Fast forward a couple months now and we've eaten up all our tapes, the library sitting there waiting on more tapes, but I have gobs of free space on these existing tapes.

I had taken the default setting of creating a media set for every day, which it did, but I've since switched that to do no create/always continue using the current media set since I don't really understand the purpose of media pools vs. media sets and wasn't sure what that would do. I'm used to the tape functionality of Backup Exec so my expectations might be skewed here. BE had a setting for "append as needed" which it would do quite nicely. You'd get all an existing tape used up before it would go hunting for a new one.

How do I get Veeam to append data to those tapes that have tons of free space on them please?

[Shestakov]

Hello,
There is no elegant way to fill left free space on those tapes. But you can restore those files to disk, unlock the tapes and backup the files again using correct option of using same media set with creation new one each time.
Thanks!

[rreed]

Ugh. That's what I was afraid of. Thanks Shestakov. Aside from user education, will this functionality change in v9?

[Shestakov]

You are welcome.
As far as I know, no. Because it`s not a common case, which can happen only accidently. For those who want to use tapes for several jobs` writes, there is a mentioned option.

[rreed]

Very good, as long as we know what to expect. I'll be reading the fine manual on tape backup today. Do we currently have any way to manage media sets? Will we in v9, in case we're a big dummy (like I apparently have been w/ it) or we otherwise goof up something and need to shuffle things around? w/o having to restore a botched tape and re-backup again?

[Shestakov]

There will be some changes, e.g. GFS Media Pools, where you have 4 media sets ("weekly", "monthly" etc.) with their own protection periods.
You can read about new tape features in the Veeam blog.

However, as I said, there will no new workaround for your issue. The best you can do now is to restore files and backup them back on one tape.

[rreed]

Excellent, and yep already setting up a large chunk of borrowed space to restore everything and start from scratch. Many thanks again.