Dedup to tape

[meskander]

I was just wondering if I use dedup to disk and then back it up to tape using backup exec, will the data that is finally written to tape be the deduped data? or will it expand?
i ask this because backup exec solution says they cannot write dedup data to tape.

[Alexey D.]

Hello,

Just out of curiosity, where did BE publish this statement? Yes, the data you write to tape will be deduped, so I am not sure what is the possible issue? Our customers are doing this for years now without any problems.

Thanks!

[meskander]

I don't know if they officially published it in a KB or a document, but this is what they told me over the phone.
And to your second question, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it, thats the answer I was hoping for. Would just be nicer if veeam can backup directly to tape.

Thanks for the reply.

[Gostev]

Can you imagine how much larger your backup window would be if we backup directly to tape? Also, you won't be able to use most of the advanced functionality like synthetic backups or vPower based capabilities (imaging running VM from tape).

Or did you mean just generic tape support, not as primary target (backup to disk, then copy to tape w/out having to leverage any 3rd party tools)?

[meskander]

It would be great if it could back up directly to tape and keep all those advanced features, but i understand that just not an option with tape.
To have generic tape support would be a great plus too so customers don't have to go out and purchase a product like backup exec to use tape.

[Mindflux]

It wouldn't dedup to tape if it was your OS (such as ZFS with dedup enabled) was what was causing the dedup (block tracking), but veeam is deduping from the source and writing your backup files deduped to disk already.

Backing up to tape would keep that dedup since it's not filesystem dependent.


Or... that's what I think on the issue.

[Gostev]

100% correct

[Gostev]

By the way, there is good fresh white paper about our dedupe (referenced in Deduplication section of FAQ). It explains our deduplication design, you can read up more details there, but essentially our dedupe was designed from ground-up specifically to be compatible with tape backups (unlike other deduplication approaches).