Tape backup question with Reverse Incrementals

[Skyview]

In a scenario I'm going to be up against, I'm going to have several backup jobs that have large Full Backups, but very small incremental jobs. Probably in the order of 4-6TB on average full backups, but nightly incrementals of about 2-3GB.

My question is this- Does what's on tape need to mirror the local storage in order to be recoverable? More specifically:

Say we have a 30 day retention for reverse incrementals. Our Full Backup file is 5TB, and eventually we'll have 30 incremental files. If I do a full tape backup of the directory, which would be the 5TB plus 30 incrementals, and from then on did an incremental tape job on only the incremental files, would that data still be recoverable?

To help answer that question, let's take a look at what the restored data might possibly look like after 90 days.

5TB Full backup file that was backed up originally 90 days ago
30 incremental backups that were backed up originally 90 days ago
60 incremental backups that were backed up over the course of 90 days

On my tape-restored data I technically have all incrementals since the last full. Would that still be recoverable data?

[foggy]

With reversed incremental mode, VBK file gets updated on daily basis, so to be able to recover, you would always need the latest VBK with its corresponding incremental files.

[Skyview]

But I would have the whole chain, so wouldn't Veeam be able to read the vbk and the 90+ vib files for restore?


Otherwise, with reverse incrementals, once you hit your retention, each time a job is ran the oldest vib is injected into the vbk, which means if you're also copying to tape, you're having to copy the ENTIRE VBK each time you run a tape backup. That seems terribly inefficient.

[Dima P.]

Yes, if you have the complete backup chain from the very first full to the very last incremental restore point it should be possible to recover once the complete backup chain is restored to staging repository.