Discussions related to exporting backups to tape and backing up directly to tape.
Petrie
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Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by Petrie »

Hi,

VBR seems to always take new tapes from the pool "free" even if there are expired tapes in the pool (let´s say pool A). This is okay so far, but if another pool (e.g. pool B) requests a tape, there are no free tapes left.
I would like to allow the expired tapes to be recycled from pool A to pool B.

How can I achieve this? If not possible I would have to try to calculate exactly how many tapes are necessary for each pool and cycle and assign them in advance.

Does anyone have an idea how to solve this?

Thanks in advance,
Helge
veremin
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by veremin »

I would like to allow the expired tapes to be recycled from pool A to pool B.
Could elaborate on it a little bit? You want for pool B to take tapes from pool A, once these tapes are expired, right? Thanks.
Petrie
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by Petrie »

Yes, that is exactly what I want. :wink: Sorry for being short.

I have six different pools and I do NOT want to distribute new tapes to the pools after inserting them into the library. Instead I want to leave them in the "free" pool and have them assigned automatically from there when a tape is needed. This works so far.

If a tape is needed VBR always takes a NEW tape. This is by design, I assume. So, as time goes by, there are no more tapes in the "free" pool.
This leads to the situation that - as long as there are tapes in the "free" pool - , the old and expired tapes remain in their pools, but are not used any further.

Once a pool needs a new tape, but has no expired ones, the job cannot continue, because there are no more tapes in the "free" pool and because it cannot take one the expired tapes of any other pool.
veremin
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by veremin »

Yes, that is exactly what I want.
This is by design. VB&R won't assign to media pool any tapes that don't belong to it.
VBR seems to always take new tapes from the pool "free" even if there are expired tapes in the pool (let´s say pool A).
According to our QA team, expired tapes should have a priority over tapes from "Free" Media Pool. In other words, if there are expired tapes present in the given media pool, they should be taken first.

So, you might want to open a ticket with support team to confirm your environment, as well as, the settings of media pool.

Thanks.
nunciate
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by nunciate » 1 person likes this post

I would like to have this added as a feature. Possibly as part of the media pool settings. The setting would allow tapes that expire to automatically move into the Free Media Pool so they become available for use in any pool.
I know this is an option in other backup software I have used so it is a pretty common thing. It would allow for more efficient use of media across pools.

I do this manually today. Each day I received tapes back from offsite. I check-in the tapes and verify their info in Veeam. If they are truly ready to expire I manually move them to the Free Media Pool thus making them available for any job to use.
veremin
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by veremin »

Currently, it's not possible to change this behaviour. Nevertheless, I believe that you can achieve what you're after with little PS scripting in place. The script will check the status of mediums in corresponding media pools, whether they are expired or not, and move the expired ones of free media pool.

Thanks.
Petrie
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by Petrie »

v.Eremin wrote:According to our QA team, expired tapes should have a priority over tapes from "Free" Media Pool. In other words, if there are expired tapes present in the given media pool, they should be taken first.
Hm, - that surprises me. I think, I will do a little testing again. Right now, I only have a very small library und a little number of tapes. This might have influenced the test results negatively.
Petrie
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by Petrie »

nunciate wrote:I would like to have this added as a feature. Possibly as part of the media pool settings. The setting would allow tapes that expire to automatically move into the Free Media Pool so they become available for use in any pool.
I know this is an option in other backup software I have used so it is a pretty common thing. It would allow for more efficient use of media across pools.
+1

This would really be great. We use EMC Networker where this is an option that can be set for each media pool: "Recycle to other pools", as well as "Recycle from other pools".
Petrie
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by Petrie »

v.Eremin wrote:Nevertheless, I believe that you can achieve what you're after with little PS scripting in place. The script will check the status of mediums in corresponding media pools, ...
How can I determine wether a tape has expired or not? Perhaps I am missing something, but the only way I am currently aware of is to _try_ to mark a certain tape as "free" and than wait for the "...not retired yet..." message. ;-)
Or is it a flag you can query via PS?

Thank you very much for your help!
veremin
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by veremin »

There should to be a parameter of tape medium available through PS. Some Boolean parameter, like "isexpired" or similar. I will provide more information, once I have access to backup console.

Thanks.
Petrie
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by Petrie »

Thanks in advance!

Meanwhile I tried this:

Code: Select all

Get-VBRTapeMedium | Select Name, IsFree, IsLocked, Retired
I have two interesting tapes (one has expired to my opinion and it doesn´t show the "Retention period is not over" message when trying to mark it as free, the one is still within the retention period), but the output is the same for both tapes.

I will wait for your information. :wink:
veremin
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by veremin »

Just checked and the Boolean parameter I was talking about is "$_.IsOverwriteProtectionPeriodOver()". Thanks.
Petrie
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by Petrie » 1 person likes this post

Thank you very much!

Code: Select all

Get-VBRTapeMedium | Where-Object { $_.IsOverwriteProtectionPeriodOver() -eq 1}
...works great :-)

Nontheless it would be great, if you could see this in the GUI and if we had an option like "Move exprired tapes back to free pool" (or "Recycle expired tapes to other pools", as mentioned before).

Regards,
Helge
veremin
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by veremin » 1 person likes this post

We're planning to improve tape GUI in the one of the next product versions. So, thanks for the feedback; much appreciated.
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by Dima P. »

Hello,
VBR seems to always take new tapes from the pool "free" even if there are expired tapes in the pool (let´s say pool A). This is okay so far, but if another pool (e.g. pool B) requests a tape, there are no free tapes left.
The tape counts as expired when all the "backup sets" (the backups taken during each backup sessions) are expired. Media set creation option enabled to create a new media for every backup session will guarantee that your tape retention equals media pool retention.However, if tape holds more than one backup set, the retention would be taken from the last backup set on tape.

So let’s say your tape media hold 3 backups from Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Retention on the media pool was set to 1 week. Such tape would be retired (and will be reused inside this media pool) only at the end of next Wednesday. The time of the expiration may vary as the last job run may vary, but we count the expiration entity as “day”.

Thank you for the heads about the recycling!
Petrie
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by Petrie »

Thank you very much for this explanation. Good to know, how the program works internally. :)
And also thank you for this forum and your readiness to dicuss these topics with us, - also highly appreciated!

Have a good weekend!
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by AaronD »

nunciate wrote:I would like to have this added as a feature. Possibly as part of the media pool settings. The setting would allow tapes that expire to automatically move into the Free Media Pool so they become available for use in any pool.
I know this is an option in other backup software I have used so it is a pretty common thing. It would allow for more efficient use of media across pools.

I do this manually today. Each day I received tapes back from offsite. I check-in the tapes and verify their info in Veeam. If they are truly ready to expire I manually move them to the Free Media Pool thus making them available for any job to use.
+1 This makes a lot of sense. Had to search Google to see if this was a functionality of Veeam (how I found this thread). Hopefully makes it into upcoming release.

Additional feature requests:
1) Add "Expiration Date" column so we can view the expiration date of our tapes
2) Ability to modify the expiration date from the GUI. Right now we have one media pool for all of our backups (we do daily incrementals with weekly active fulls), so we only have one retention period. However, we have Daily, Monthly and Quarterly backup job retention periods. So right now our retentions periods in Veeam do not match up with the retention periods at Iron Mountain. We could manually move the Monthly and Quarterly backups to different pools, but then we would need to re-inventory/catalog the tapes (and then move them back to Free once they return so they can be written to again).
3) Much more granular scheduling for GFS
veremin
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by veremin » 1 person likes this post

1) According to the plan, it should be added in version 8. For now, you can use Veeam ONE report called "Tape backup" in order to get that information

2) The retention settings are configurable on media pool level and applied to mediaset, rather than to individual media. So, the ability to modify expiration date of particular cassette wouldn't fit in the whole picture.

3) You mean tape GFS, right? For now, the only way to achieve it is to use certain workaround.

Thanks.
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by Dima P. »

Hello,
Ability to modify the expiration date from the GUI. Right now we have one media pool for all of our backups (we do daily incrementals with weekly active fulls), so we only have one retention period. However, we have Daily, Monthly and Quarterly backup job retention periods. So right now our retentions periods in Veeam do not match up with the retention periods at Iron Mountain.
In next version we would provide the ability to change retention of the existing media pool, with applying to either new or/and all the existing tape media in the media pool. Another feature is to enable software protection switch, which would prevent the specified tape from being retired (same as write protect switch on the tape media), I guess this two being implemented would cover your scenario.
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by AaronD »

Thank you for responding.

1) Great (d.popov: Thank you for letting me know. I was curious how this was being applied and glad there will be more clarity in v8)

2) Will moving tapes between media pools still require re-cataloging? One solution to achieve what I want (being able to having expiration dates in Veeam reflect Iron Mountain), would be to manually move the tapes to different pools after specific backups (weekly, monthly, quarterly) to get the different expiration date associated with that pool. However, this really isn't ideal to have to manually move tapes between pools.

3) Yes, I did see that thread prior to writing this post. Is a "superseding" ability on the roadmap? Or more customization with tape backup scheduling ("do not run backup on this date/schedule" -- so that we can create another "Quarterly" tape backup job going to different media pool --- or allow for multiple logic "move to pool X except for last day/week of month move to pool Y and last day/week of quarter move to pool Z").
veremin
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by veremin »

Tape gets moved between media pools in two steps. Firstly, it's moved to free media pool. Secondly, to the required media pool. So, the catalog operation would still be necessary in order to explore the content of this or that particular tape. Thanks.
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[MERGED] move expired tapes to free pool

Post by lowlander »

Hi,

we are planning using multiple GFS tape pools. However we experience the behaviour that expired tapes won't move automatically to the free pool. Seems that these tapes will be reused again.

Do I miss a checkbox within Veeam, or are there other methods for moving expired tapes to the free pool ?

thanks !
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by lowlander »

When using GFS pools, the expired tapes stay in the GFS pool. Only we to move them is to do this manually, while automatic would be preferrable.
veremin
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by veremin »

You can write a simple PS script that being executed on predefined bases will move all expired tapes to the Free media pool. I think there are already several examples written for this matter. Thanks.
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by mma »

+1 one feature request :-)
I like to have an option to export expired GFS tapes to the "Free" media pool in the GUI.

Yes, you like to have the GUI easy and clean - but the amount of "there is a registry key for this*" and "you can schedule a script for this" is getting longer and longer in every release.... :roll:


* I still don't like the fact that there is no list of it...

Regards
Marcel
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by Dima P. »

Hi Marcel,

It's true - we have this request is tracked as very demanded, so there is a chance you will see this option in the UI. Cheers!
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by dschuler »

Has there been any update on this? We are just deploying a tape infrastructure in our Veeam environment and are running into this as an issue. I still don't see a feature for it in 9.5u2, is this something we can expects in u3 or 10.0?
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by Didi7 »

Quote: Move expired tapes from any pool to the FREE media pool automatically

Honestly, as this has been already discussed 3 years ago, I thought, while reading this thread, this had already been integrated into VBR. Unfortunately, this is not the case. It is available in many other backup products, as a standard feature and probably one of the most demanding feature request reading the forums here. It is annoying that Veeam expects this to be done by customers manually, really!

Quote: Catalogs from tape media gets deleted, as soon as it is moved manually from one to another pool

I remember asking here long ago, why VBR forces the catalog to be deleted of tape media, that is moved from one to another pool. This is also not the case in many backup products I know and reading this thread I realize a lot of people find it annoying as well and I really have not found any good explanation, why this is done by VBR compared to other products. To me, it would make sense, if catalog data is removed from tape media, that has expired and moved to the FREE media pool but not if it has been moved manually from one to another pool! Also, this behaviour has been identified by Veeam forum members, which told me, it would make sense to keep the catalog data, when tape media is moved between pools but unfortunately it is still not integrated!

+1 for move expired tape media automatically to the FREE media pool
+1 for do not remove catalog data for tape media that is moved to other media pools (exception FREE media pool)

Let's see, if this can make into 9.5 U3 or if dust settles will be forgotten again!

Regards,
Didi7

P.S.: Power Shell scripts are nice workarounds for the time being but not for feature requests being requested several times over a period of several months or years
Using the most recent Veeam B&R in many different environments now and counting!
MihaiC.
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by MihaiC. »

9.5 U3 did not include the "export expired tapes to the "Free" media pool in the GUI." option.
Any updates for when it will be added?
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Re: Recycle expired tapes to other pools

Post by Dima P. »

Hello MihaiC.

Unfortunately, this feature is not available yet. Please use the suggested workaround and thank you for bringing this topic back – we will discuss this potential improvement with the tape team. Cheers!
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