sharing tapes / appending tapes

[owenw]

Hi,

I have a question regarding appending tape job. Heres the backgruond.

I have veeam 9 configured for reverse incrementals which run daily. I also have 14 days retention to disk in the event I need to recover anything for a week or 2.

The reason for reverse incrementals is we require daily backups to tape which contain complete revovery media in the event of a Disaster. The tapes are taken offsite each day around lunchtime.

At present I have 2x clusters which are backed up as seperate reverse incremental jobs.

Our Prod cluster disk backup processes about 6.7TB of data actually transferring about 100GB each backup.
Out App Cluster disk backup processes about 1.3TB transferring about 43GB daily.

I currently have these writing to tape daily.

I have a LTO6 2 head library which I have 2 tapes placed daily for the duplicate to tape jobs.
1x tape for Prod and 1x tape for App cluster data.

This equates to about 28TB in total being transferred to tape each morning.
~300GB to the Apps Cluster Tape
~2.5TB to the Prod tape

What I would like to know is as we are right up against the limit of the Prod tape, rather than have this Prod Tape job turn into a 2 tape job, can I have the 2x jobs make full use of the existing 2x tapes each day, instead of seeing the App tape mostly empty.

Many thanks

Owen

[owenw]

Just realised Ive not mentioned the tape job.

This is currently 2x tape jobs containing 1 source backup job each. (Job, not repository).
Both tape and disk jobs have separate repositories / pools for each server.
Options are set to process latest full backup chain only.
Media Pool retention is set to 26 days.

Thanks

[Dima P.]

Hi Owen,

If you would like to use one tape job for both ‘App Cluster’ and ‘Prod Cluster’ source jobs, then yes – that’s possible. You can create a single backup to tape job with these backup jobs as a source and point them to a single media pool.

[owenw]

Thanks Dima,

That is what I had tried previously, however on occasion the job would fail after the first disk job was written to tape (locked both tapes which is exactly what I want, writing to both tapes at the same time to reduce backup window) however when the second job tried to write to the tape about 8 hours later than usual (due to Compacting kicking in when I have it scheduled for a Sunday, but actually starts on a Monday night).

It would appear that there is some sort of append timeout where the tape gets marked as unappendable.

Can you confirm if there are any mechanisms in place in Veeam 9 which would cause this?

All backups to tape work fine any other day. This is only an issue when Compacting kicks in between the disk and tape jobs, thus delaying writing to disk of the 2nd part of the tape job by anywhere between 2 and 10 hours.

Regards
Owen

[pkelly_sts]

Is it possible that you've ticked the "Export current media set upon job completion" box on the "Options" pane of the tape job configuration?

[owenw]

I have the eject option selected, but not the export option.
This was a lesson I learned previously

[owenw]

I have switched the tape job back to having 2x disk jobs, with media pool options set for parallel processing using 2 heads.
This is how it was previously and was working fine until a month ago when I added in the compact setting to the job.

Compact setting has been scheduled for Saturday to coincide with Saturday disk backup job.
I dont have tape jobs set for Saturday so hopefully this will solve this.

Thanks
Owen