Help understanding tape backup config

[Blue407]

Morning All

I have just migrated from BackupExec, so please excuse my ignorance of exactly how Veeam works as I'm still getting to grips with it.

I have configured a tape backup job to run at 21:00, it backs up the last full backup of one of my VM's to tape.
Once this completes I want to backup the last full backup of another server, then another etc, all appending to the same tape (Single drive, no library/autoloader)

With BE I would set the first job to erase/format the tape and other jobs to append to tape.

How do I do this in Veeam?

We use a Mon, Wed, Thur, Fri tape which are re-used each week. The Tue tape is kept for 2 years.

[veremin]

A quick question - are those VMs to archive present inside one or several backup jobs? And what backup mode this job(s) is leveraging? Forward forever incremental, forward incremental with periodic fulls, reversed incremental? Thanks.

[Shestakov]

Hello Paul!
Another question is about the source job(s) schedule. Do they run daily?
And about "Tuesday" tape, do you keep it for a year and use new tape every Tuesday? I guess you write full backups there each time, is that correct?
Thanks!

[Blue407]

The source jobs run every 2 hours from 08:00 until 21:00 every weekday, 210 copies are to be kept (6 weeks worth)
Each job backs up a separate Hyper-V VM.
Each job uses reverse incremental - I like the fact that I always have an effective full backup without having to add any incrementals to it. Its this full backup that I want to send to tape.
Every backup to tape is the full version, no incrementals. We have just purchased a LTO7 drive and are using LTO6 tapes for this which has sufficient capacity for us now. (We just ran out of space on LTO5)

Tuesday tape is kept for min 2 years, new Tue tape every week. (We have run like this for the past 12 years and it's proven successful for us)
As we are just now introducing Veeam, I hope that the majority of restores are going to be from disk, especially as they are typically just individual user files from a Full VM backup.
Having a backup to tape is just a nice to have, knowing you have something you can hold in your hand and store in a firesafe is a nice warm feeling

Once this is all up and running I will also look to copy these backups to an off-site server.

So once this is finished we can do restores for 6 weeks from disk or 2 years from tape, plus off-site copies for DR.

Last step will be to investigate Veeam Replication for the running VM's, currently we use the native Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Replication, but it sometimes stops and needs to be manually kicked off, which is a pain to monitor.

[veremin]

May I ask why are you using multiple backup and backup to tape jobs (one per VM) instead of single one? Thanks.

[Blue407]

May I ask why are you using multiple backup and backup to tape jobs (one per VM) instead of single one? Thanks.

From things I read on here and previous experience with BE, I felt it was most appropriate to do it this way. (From memory, performance and
I have a few jobs running simultaneously (Smaller VM's) and some staggered (Larger VM's).

Also if I want to restore an individual file from a single VM, isn't it easier to just restore one VM, rather than the whole backup?

If my thoughts are wrong, please let me know

[Shestakov]

Starting from v9 VBR has a nice Per-VM Backup Files feature helping you to backup VMs in the same job, but store them in separate files. It helps you get better processing with easier job management.
For historical backups you can use GFS retention(both for disk and tape).
I would also suggest you a good best practices article.

[Blue407]

Had a quick look through those, none of them seem to explain the tape format/append bit, or have I missed something?

[Shestakov]

You haven`t, those links were for general discussion about job scheduling and backup planning.
Speaking about tape append, you need to choose a desired option in media pool setting. Since you want to rotate tape every day, the option to choose is to "Create new media set for every backup session". On the next step of the same wizard you can specify retention settings. The protection to be set in your case is 1 week.
For historical/long-term backups you need either to put the Tuesday tape offline manually or leverage GFS media pool, as was suggested in my previous post.
Thanks!

[veremin]

The settings recommended by Nikita are applicable in case when you have single tape job archiving multiple backup jobs.

Otherwise (multiple tape jobs), media set should be created once a day to guarantee that various tape jobs executed throughout a day use the same tape, appending data to it. Overwrite protection period should be set to one week.

Also, you have two options to take care about long-term protection of Tuesday tape: manage its retention manually by manually protecting it, or create a GFS backup to tape job and let it handle tape retention automatically.

Thanks.