Discussions related to exporting backups to tape and backing up directly to tape.
Post Reply
Jens-Christian
Lurker
Posts: 1
Liked: 1 time
Joined: Jan 14, 2016 3:40 pm
Full Name: Jens-Christian Baltes
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by Jens-Christian » 1 person likes this post

+1 direct restore from Tape (for me +10)
To be honest when we changed to VEEAM8 I did not expect this to be an issue at all. Coming from BackupExec 2014.
Agreed backup to disk is the priority, but....
I am not sure how many of the people responding before are in Automotive: some nice requirements there:
1. tapes must be encrypted (that is at least not an issue, just makes it a little bit slower)
2. at least quarterly restore tests: now I need to test on some data but not all....I wonder what repository sizes Veeam expects to do that.
I have a 10 TB repository, where we had the idea to be able to keep 2 full backups and in between write to tape for long term
(at least with the current server sizes of 2,5 TB and 3.1 TB together with deduplication and compression this works )
And now I realize that I need to restore a full VM to restore because I need some CAD files from last year......

besides I am sure it is quite well known that certain files e.g. for financial / taxes legally have to be stored long term. Now obviously the files are just not deleted.....until you have special users.....
Pretty disapointing that this did not even make it into Version 9

Does one know if finally V9 recognizes cleaning tapes in a library....would worth to upgrade......besides probably some other features

...meanwhile I keep dreaming of 300TB storage and the hope that there is no request to restore files older than a month....
McClane
Expert
Posts: 106
Liked: 11 times
Joined: Jun 20, 2009 12:47 pm
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by McClane »

If we switch to Veeam, we will have about 30TB repo. I also opt in for direct restore from tape.
Dima P.
Product Manager
Posts: 14396
Liked: 1568 times
Joined: Feb 04, 2013 2:07 pm
Full Name: Dmitry Popov
Location: Prague
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by Dima P. »

Hi folks,

Following up to let you know that the request to support direct VM from tape restore is now marked with highest priority, so stay tuned for updates. There were no improvements for cleaning media management in v9 release (basically, we still rely on library’s native tools). Are you seeking for scheduled drive cleaning within VBR UI? Thanks
rreed
Veteran
Posts: 354
Liked: 72 times
Joined: Jun 30, 2015 6:06 pm
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by rreed » 1 person likes this post

Awesome job responding to customer demand Dima, thanks! Yes please for B&R to either automatically clean itself as needed (best) or at least notify us when the drive needs cleaning. I understand at least some tape drives can pass that call along to the backup software to notify/self clean. But yes, full backup and maintenance automation is the goal for many of us please. I'd have to look again but I don't believe our particular library either notifies or especially self cleans as needed. I think ours relies on the the human to manually monitor and maintain. I know our Backup Exec handles it nicely but we're walking away from them. Thanks again Veeam!
VMware 6
Veeam B&R v9
Dell DR4100's
EMC DD2200's
EMC DD620's
Dell TL2000 via PE430 (SAS)
Dima P.
Product Manager
Posts: 14396
Liked: 1568 times
Joined: Feb 04, 2013 2:07 pm
Full Name: Dmitry Popov
Location: Prague
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by Dima P. » 1 person likes this post

automatically clean itself as needed
That's the plan :wink:
ddayton
Enthusiast
Posts: 45
Liked: 19 times
Joined: Nov 12, 2012 6:40 pm
Full Name: Don Dayton
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by ddayton »

Our tape library has the self clean functionality, BUT... The LTO drive cleaning cartridge is in a pre-defined magazine slot and self cleaning is enabled, but we do not know if and when it self cleans. More importantly since we don't know when it cleans we also don't know if the cleaning cartridge usage is exhausted or might exhaust during a long weekend (heaven forbid). This tape library is located in our offsite computer room with our VMware server for replications and NAS storage for our Backup Copy secondary storage. So until it is time to change tapes in the 24 (-1) slot library the room is unoccupied. If we could control the cleaning schedule then we would know exactly when to change the CC.

Not a must have, but it would be nice to have and a plus for tape backup reliabilty.
And so would single file restore from tape. Had to throw that in there to keep on topic from where this thread started.
Dima P.
Product Manager
Posts: 14396
Liked: 1568 times
Joined: Feb 04, 2013 2:07 pm
Full Name: Dmitry Popov
Location: Prague
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by Dima P. » 1 person likes this post

Thanks Don. I doubt that we will make file from vm from tape recovery possible: more likely, we will support direct vm from tape recovery. It should make your life a lot easier since you may recover the VM and then copy the needed file.

P.S. Yes cleaning tape support is in the list, but additional thanks for sharing your use case!
PenguinSSH
Enthusiast
Posts: 28
Liked: 2 times
Joined: Feb 26, 2015 7:19 pm
Full Name: PenguinSSH
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by PenguinSSH »

Actually, restoring a multiple terabyte VBK to restore a couple of text documents that weight a couple of kilobytes is extremely painful. We try to keep as many restore points as possible on disks, but files that have to be restored from 1-7 years ago are on tape.

For file servers, it would be extremely helpful to be able to restore a single file from within a VBK on tape. I understand this would theoretically be a lot of work but a feature like this is already available for a long time for other backup software on the market.
cdcnorton
Lurker
Posts: 2
Liked: never
Joined: Jan 29, 2016 5:18 pm
Full Name: Charlie Norton
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by cdcnorton »

New to Veeam,

We currently have limited disk space and are backing up straight from VM to tape.

Are these statements true in my Environment with no backups to disk:
There is no direct restore of OS files from tape to VM or HD. The Full or Inc backup point has to be restored from tape in order to get an individual file restored.
There is no way to backup files straight from VM to tape, it's the Full VM.
You have to backup the Full VM to disk to be able to restore OS files from it.
You can backup individual files to tape from a backup on disk 1st.

I am coming from years of experience with Symantec Backup Exec; so just trying to get my head around the current limitations of Veeam Backup & Replication.

Thanks
Dima P.
Product Manager
Posts: 14396
Liked: 1568 times
Joined: Feb 04, 2013 2:07 pm
Full Name: Dmitry Popov
Location: Prague
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by Dima P. »

Hi cdcnorton,
There is no direct restore of OS files from tape to VM or HD. The Full or Inc backup point has to be restored from tape in order to get an individual file restored.
Yes, restore to staging repository is required. For restoring from an incremental backup you need to restore all previous incremental restore points in the chain and full backup.
There is no way to backup files straight from VM to tape, it's the Full VM.
There is a file to tape job that can backup files from any host.
You have to backup the Full VM to disk to be able to restore OS files from it.
Yes, if that was the right question :wink:
You can backup individual files to tape from a backup on disk 1st
No. There are two types of tape jobs - one to backup files another is for backup files (it acts differently, has different schedule etc) Check this Help Center article to get more info about tape support.
cdcnorton
Lurker
Posts: 2
Liked: never
Joined: Jan 29, 2016 5:18 pm
Full Name: Charlie Norton
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by cdcnorton »

Thanks for the info but not clear on one point, Files to Tape Job.
We have a Users Home Directory fileserver with about 2 TB of data. I'd like to be able to select the Full \Homedir users directory, back it up with Files to Tape and be able to pull a single file off the tape. Is this possible?

Thanks for your help.
veremin
Product Manager
Posts: 20270
Liked: 2252 times
Joined: Oct 26, 2012 3:28 pm
Full Name: Vladimir Eremin
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by veremin »

Correct. In order to restore a single file from tape, follow these instructions. Thanks.
bcann
Novice
Posts: 6
Liked: never
Joined: Oct 30, 2015 3:28 am
Full Name: Brad Cann
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by bcann »

Dima P. wrote:Thanks Don. I doubt that we will make file from vm from tape recovery possible: more likely, we will support direct vm from tape recovery. It should make your life a lot easier since you may recover the VM and then copy the needed file.

P.S. Yes cleaning tape support is in the list, but additional thanks for sharing your use case!
SO you want us to spend up to 8 hours recovering a FIle server VM, to then strip a single file from it.... where is the difference to recover the vbk then grab the file from that?

Talk about tape users being treated like second class citizens.
PTide
Product Manager
Posts: 6408
Liked: 724 times
Joined: May 19, 2015 1:46 pm
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by PTide »

With all respect to tapes they should never be the only backup media. So the scenario when you have to recover a single file not from backup repo but from tape is really rare - that would mean that one is using tapes only (or only tapes have survived SHIG event), or that the file to be recovered is so old that it's been already sent for long-term archiving to tape.

Thank you.
rreed
Veteran
Posts: 354
Liked: 72 times
Joined: Jun 30, 2015 6:06 pm
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by rreed » 4 people like this post

If it would help anyone, my policy has always been to set very clear and level expectations w/ users on recovery times - especially when it comes from tape. I have always been very clear and open w/ my users that if they need something restored from recent times (that's on disk, w/in a couple weeks to as much as month and a half depending on environments at the time) I can get it back to them in minutes to hours. If I have to go to tape, they are thoroughly aware it will take some time, as much as a couple of days depending on how far back they need (ever gone digging through storage for a particular tape?). Everyone has always been very and happy w/ these conditions having clearly understood them. No one has ever once complained when I had to go back to tape and it took up to 1-2 full days for those restores. For years I have never had a single problem w/ this SLA.

I've brought this same policy to my current position where we've only very recently began using Veeam for tape, having used Backup Exec and several other tape backup software throughout the years. Same results, users are very fine w/ this level expectation. While Veeam does still have a way to go to maturity in their tape offerings, the product has indeed been getting much better, and they do seem to listen to customer demands which is also really great. Hopefully we can all be patient (myself included!) while they get some more needed features built into the product. If single file restores are a long shot, I still dream of direct VM restore from tape! :wink:
VMware 6
Veeam B&R v9
Dell DR4100's
EMC DD2200's
EMC DD620's
Dell TL2000 via PE430 (SAS)
Dima P.
Product Manager
Posts: 14396
Liked: 1568 times
Joined: Feb 04, 2013 2:07 pm
Full Name: Dmitry Popov
Location: Prague
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by Dima P. »

Brad,

We never treated tape users as a ‘second class citizens’. Tape component evolves pretty fast - just check the number of improvements we made in latest release specifically for tape support . What’s more important we are not going to stop and keep bringing the most requested features to the table in every release.

rreed,

Thank you for sharing your experience. Dreams may come true even faster than you expect :wink:
Gostev
Chief Product Officer
Posts: 31460
Liked: 6648 times
Joined: Jan 01, 2006 1:01 am
Location: Baar, Switzerland
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by Gostev »

v9 What's New: Tape enhancements take 1 page out of 10 pages (more than any other functionality area).
v8 What's New: Tape enhancements also take nearly 1 page out of 12 pages.

And tape users still think they are being treated like second class citizens... :D
bcann
Novice
Posts: 6
Liked: never
Joined: Oct 30, 2015 3:28 am
Full Name: Brad Cann
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by bcann »

Dima P. wrote:Brad,

We never treated tape users as a ‘second class citizens’. Tape component evolves pretty fast - just check the number of improvements we made in latest release specifically for tape support . What’s more important we are not going to stop and keep bringing the most requested features to the table in every release.

rreed,

Thank you for sharing your experience. Dreams may come true even faster than you expect :wink:
And yet the most basic tape features that have been around for 15+ years in EVERY other product on the market (clean tape, restore files from tape), are non existent and have been promised for 2 major releases and counting. Instead it seems to me that you underestimated your customers and what they have onsite and are now playing catch-up, but are still quite behind. as far as tape components evolving fast .... cmon now, who is kidding who... tape has incrementally evolved for 2 decades with mostly just an increase in capacity and format the tape comes in and file system it uses may evolve, but its pretty incremental not evolutionary.
Gostev wrote:v9 What's New: Tape enhancements take 1 page out of 10 pages (more than any other functionality area).
v8 What's New: Tape enhancements also take nearly 1 page out of 12 pages.

And tape users still think they are being treated like second class citizens... :D
And once you take out the explanation for what the features are there are 6-7 odd features added, totalling a 1/4 page, one of which should've been there from the start of tapes (GFS)
Gostev
Chief Product Officer
Posts: 31460
Liked: 6648 times
Joined: Jan 01, 2006 1:01 am
Location: Baar, Switzerland
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by Gostev »

Except those "6-7 odd features" were at the top of the list of features most requested by your fellow users, because this is the only metric we use when prioritizing pending features... granted, they may not be important to you personally, but they were clearly very important to the rest and resulted in much feedback.

Regardless, your perception of specific features does not change the fact that tape had more love than any other functionality area in the last 3 major releases, even purely from R&D man hours perspective. And the only goal of my post was to show you some facts proving that your statement regarding our treatment of tape users has nothing in common with reality.
B2r2
Influencer
Posts: 13
Liked: 1 time
Joined: Apr 04, 2016 4:48 pm
Full Name: Craig Wardell
Location: Preston, Lancashire
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by B2r2 »

Better Tape support please...being able to restore files from tape is definately needed in my environment. Currently considering my options after only using Veeam for 1 month. Very shocked that this is not as slick as the rest of the veeam interface, restoring a file from tape is a basic much needed requirement of any backup software.

Sent from my D6603 using Tapatalk
Dima P.
Product Manager
Posts: 14396
Liked: 1568 times
Joined: Feb 04, 2013 2:07 pm
Full Name: Dmitry Popov
Location: Prague
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by Dima P. »

B2r2,

Actually, you can restore a single file that was previously backed up via file to tape job. Are you referring to file level recovery from a VM that is stored on tape?
isolated_1
Enthusiast
Posts: 44
Liked: 5 times
Joined: Apr 09, 2015 8:33 pm
Full Name: Simon Chan
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by isolated_1 » 1 person likes this post

Count me in on being able to restore a single file from a VBK file on tape.

I was just Googling around and found this thread because at the moment, I'm having to restore an entire 800GB VBK file from tape to disk just to restore a single file within a VM. I'm sure a lot of users out there would want this feature. It could be that they never realized it due to them not having to do a single file restore from tape before but imagine their surprise when they find out that the entire VBK needs to be restored first prior to being able to browse/restore that one single file.

EDIT:
So I just read in the previous page that DIna confirmed direct restore of VM to tape feature has been marked with highest priority. This is slightly better only if the file I need to recover from sits on a VM that is not large. In most cases however, it would be sitting on a file server VM and we all know how large those can get. I'm still glad that Veeam takes customer request seriously even though it seems like they are on top of the food chain when it comes to enterprise level VM backup. We all know how innovation stops for many products once they have no competition so kudos there to Veeam. I'll still be crossing my fingers for the day when we have the ability to directly restore a file from a VBK file sitting on tape.
Dima P.
Product Manager
Posts: 14396
Liked: 1568 times
Joined: Feb 04, 2013 2:07 pm
Full Name: Dmitry Popov
Location: Prague
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by Dima P. »

Hello Simon,

Thanks for being honest. Yes, as promised direct VM restore from tape coming. File level recovery from vm on tape might be a next step, so thanks for pushing :wink:
B2r2
Influencer
Posts: 13
Liked: 1 time
Joined: Apr 04, 2016 4:48 pm
Full Name: Craig Wardell
Location: Preston, Lancashire
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by B2r2 »

Dima P. wrote:B2r2,

Actually, you can restore a single file that was previously backed up via file to tape job. Are you referring to file level recovery from a VM that is stored on tape?
Hi Dima P.

Yes file level recovery from a VM is what I was asking for without having to mount the data first. (A basic need that is currently over complicated, time consuming and most of the time not possible due to not having the space to be able to mount the VM before restoring files)
Dima P.
Product Manager
Posts: 14396
Liked: 1568 times
Joined: Feb 04, 2013 2:07 pm
Full Name: Dmitry Popov
Location: Prague
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by Dima P. »

Craig,

Fair. Thanks for the clarification!
rreed
Veteran
Posts: 354
Liked: 72 times
Joined: Jun 30, 2015 6:06 pm
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by rreed »

+1 for restoring a file from a vbk that's on tape if possible please. Case in point, yesterday had to do just that. We back up directly to dedupe device (yeah, I know), then from there we pull vbk's to tape. Needed a single file from a 2.6TB vbk. We're fortunate enough that we have some spare SAN space right now to borrow to temporarily store a 2.6TB file but might not always, and not everyone may be able to in the first place. Keep at it, Veeam. :)
VMware 6
Veeam B&R v9
Dell DR4100's
EMC DD2200's
EMC DD620's
Dell TL2000 via PE430 (SAS)
mickllf
Novice
Posts: 7
Liked: never
Joined: Jun 24, 2015 3:23 pm
Full Name: Michael Moran
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by mickllf »

Argh, I have been using Veeam for over a year and have just been tasked with trying to get a file back from one of our month end tapes. I had no idea that restoring a single file from a VM within the backup was not possible. I now have to restore a 6TB vbk to get to the file I need to restore.... A definite +1 from me for getting that functionality built into the next release!
jazzoberoi
Enthusiast
Posts: 96
Liked: 23 times
Joined: Oct 08, 2014 9:07 am
Full Name: Jazz Oberoi
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by jazzoberoi »

+1 from me as well, its not always possible to "reserve" the space needed to first restore a multi-tb .vbk from Tape to Disk and then restore.
McClane
Expert
Posts: 106
Liked: 11 times
Joined: Jun 20, 2009 12:47 pm
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by McClane »

+1 from me, too. Restoring 5TB of data takes a very long time from tape, just to recover a 400kB document.
vanakenarch
Novice
Posts: 8
Liked: never
Joined: Sep 17, 2014 7:28 am
Full Name: Lars Bemelmans
Contact:

Re: Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

Post by vanakenarch »

+1 definitly for me. I have a 8TB fileserver and when I need to restore a single file or projectfolder, I first have to restore a 7TB .vbk file from tape (LTO5) which takes a lot of time and then restore the files (in seconds).
Hope a decent solution is coming soon.
Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Baidu [Spider] and 23 guests