Using the "After..." option for tape jobs

[dwakim]

Hi,

We run Veeam V9.
I tried to set our backup to tape jobs to run automatically after the full backup jobs are finished, by enabling the "After XXX" option.

The backup schedule is set to run incremental backups Monday through Wednesday, and Friday - and full backups would run for some large file servers from Thursday to Saturday. Normally the full backups are finished sometime during the night/early Saturday morning, so I figured that by enabling the 'After..' option I would not have to think about timing the tape jobs to start. It worked OK to start the tape jobs once the full backups were finished.
There is quite a lot of data to be written to tape, so the tape jobs starts as I said Saturday and continues to run until ca. Tuesday afternoon for these specific file servers. (Let's call them A, B and C.)

Here's what happened:

The tape jobs were running through Saturday, Sunday but when Monday came, and Veeam started the incremental jobs of the same servers (A, B, C), the second the incremental jobs were finished, Veeam tried to start a tape job of those servers - although the tape library is busy running the already ongoing tape job of the same file servers, and thus crashing the ongoing jobs.

TL;DR:
How can you configure Veeam to know that the "After.." option for backup to tape should only run for FULL backups, and not after every incremental job?

Regards,
D.

[Dima P.]

Hi D,

It seems that you could use a backup job chaining approach, so tape job gets started only after the source job is completed (Start after this job schedule option). Additionally, you could disable incremental backup to tape.

[dwakim]

Hi Dima,

Thanks for replying.

That is what we are using, the Start after this job option. But that will try to start a tape job as soon as the incremental job is finished for any of those servers - even when a full backup of that server is already running (to tape).
We do not use incremental backups to tape.

Not sure I'm able to explain our situation in a good way..

Regards,
D

[Dima P.]

dwakim,

Thanks for the clarification, now I got it. This behavior is indeed strange and I’ll discuss it with the team. Meanwhile, is it possible to set the tape job schedule to start at specific time (i.e. after the full backup is created) or disk jobs create full backups at a different time schedule?

[veremin]

The fact that each cycle of source job results in execution of secondary tape job is expected, that how this type of schedule currently works.

However, such execution should not break running jobs. If it does, then, open a ticket with our support team and provide case number here.

Thanks.