Discussions related to exporting backups to tape and backing up directly to tape.
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Beheer
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How to backup only last full's to tape

Post by Beheer »

Hello,

We work with Veeam for a few months now (8.0.0.2084), and this week is the second time I'm trying to get monthly full backups on tape.
Either I'm not able to understand how to do that with B&R, or B&R doesn't allow me to do what I consider as a common used procedure.

We have 11 backup jobs.
Some of them produce a full backup once a week without incrementals.
Others are reverse incrementals with active full's during different weekends during the month (not all at the same weekend, too heavy load).
One of the jobs is with incrementals (not reverse) and a full every weekend.

During the year backup 4 weeks ago I saw a few backups putting 2 full backup files on tape. One was so big that I reran the job with the older .vbk's renamed to something else.
At that time I thought that only with incremental jobs, or jobs with only full backups, more than one full would be put on tape, and with all the reverse incremental jobs just one .vbk would be put on tape.
Today, starting the January tape backup, I notice that also the tape backup processing reverse incremental backups put more than one .vbk on tape.
Not only does this mean that because all the jobs run much longer there is not enough time between the regular disk backups, but also I need about 70 or more tapes instead of 40.

So I stopped the whole process and I first want to know if there is a way to make B&R only put the last .vbk on tape.
It would be nice if that could be with one time job configuration. I can't figure out how to do that.

The only way I can think of now, is to configure jobs manually every month, during several days that a few tape backups can run, to do a file backup of a specific .vbk.
In my opinion that's not why we have computers...

I understand that many companies have different approaches of how they want backups configured.
I only think that though backup to storage is very common these days, a periodic tape backup of only the last full's is not a rare thing to do, so there must be a way to do that easily.

Thanks in advance for any good advice and regards,
Han
Beheer
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Re: How to backup only last full's to tape

Post by Beheer »

Trying to find a solution myself this is how far I get:
The tape job that uses a backup job as source in which weekly full's and incrementals are used: It works to delete the Backup job from the tape job, save the tape job, open it again and add the backup job again. It will generate the question "One or more source backup jobs have multiple full backup chains...." where I can choose "Latest". It will process only the last .vbk.
With a tape job that uses a backup job with forward incrementals, that trick doesn't work, the question isn't asked.
I have to delete the tape job completely and re-create it, only then the "One or more source backup jobs have multiple full backup chains...." comes up where I can choose "Latest", whereafter the job will only process the last .vbk.
Not nice...
alanbolte
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Re: How to backup only last full's to tape

Post by alanbolte »

I'm not sure I follow everything that went wrong form your description, but I think you'll find v9 less frustrating. It has an explicit "Process latest full backup chain only" option in the job settings, as well as some subtle logic changes.

The option you're currently looking at is designed so that someone creating a new job can select to have only backup chains created after the date of the tape job's creation written to tape (plus the current chain), instead of everything on disk (the default behavior).
Beheer
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Re: How to backup only last full's to tape

Post by Beheer »

Right, so usually everything on disk created by the backup job is sent to tape.
It makes sense then that by deleting and re-creating the job I get the possibility to send only the last full to tape.
We will have a look at version 9 then in the near future, thanks.
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