Recovery from Tape - Needs major work

[veremin]

Currently only VM can be restored directly from tape backup. Direct restore of individual file is on our radar. Thanks.

[Wizzard]

Hey,

sometimes i have to restore data from tape. In that case i have to restore ALL the data to a disk repository first. Thats pretty bad when you have to restore files from a fileserver with more than 5-6 TB backup file size.

--> I want to restore the files directly from tape to reduce repository space and restore time (like arcserve does).

Also i want to see if the file is in the selected tape backup or not. -->
1) Catalog content of used GFS tapes on file level?
2) Then select that file and only restore that one.


Best Regards
Merlin

[bubba1983]

I run into the same issue as Wizzard. It would be nice to be able to restore directly from tape as a lot of times people need files that got accidently deleted 6 months ago and having to restore a 6TB VM to disk first just to restore 2-3 files makes the restore process long.

[filip.radkovic]

+1 for granular file restore from tapes.

Currently I'm restoring a whole fileserver VM back to repository to be able to then restore a single xls file from a year ago. Luckily I have space for it, but it will take a lot more time than I would like to.

[sreejiths]

+ 1 for granular recovery

[jveerd1]

+ 1 for granular recovery

[mbolster]

Would be a great feature!
+ 1 for granular recovery

[O1982]

+ 1 for granular recovery

[B.F.]

Are we talking 2018 radar or beyond?

[veremin]

Unfortunately, we cannot share any ETA currently. Thanks.

[simcomit]

Another + 1 for granular recovery..

[jayscarff]

Another + 1 for granular recovery..and multiple drives bring used in the a library.

EDIT: Ignore me! sorted!

[Dima P.]

Thank you!

...and multiple drives bring used in the a library.

You can use parallel processing for tape jobs, are you referring to parallel processing for recovery from tape?

[sdvorak]

Plus-one for me. I 100 percent agree with pawel's post. Good file backup and recovery for tape would be a game changer for us. But granular recovery from tape would be a nice feature.

[paruccone]

Feature suggestion: better restore selector

Actually when restoring it's only possible to select one folder per task. Let's say I have 5 folders from A to E. Each folder contains 10 subfolders from 0 to 9.
If I want to restore all folders except C\5 I have to add:
- A
- B
- D
- E
- C\1
- C\2
- C\3
- C\4
- C\6
- C\7
- C\8
- C\9

It would be much better if it was possible to do a "select all" and then unflag C\5

PS: I'm using the free edition, if the feature is already available in the non-free edition, I apologize for the spam

[Didi7]

PS: I'm using the free edition, if the feature is already available in the non-free edition, I apologize for the spam

Don't worry

[KiwiJJ]

Hi,
If I need to restore a file from the file server which is a 3.3 TB VDK file does Veeam need to restore the whole 3.3 TB from tape to disk first before I can select the files ?

thanks,

John

[DGrinev]

Hi John,

Can you clarify which files you have on the tape, .vbk and .vib or just files and folders?
Please take a look on the existing big discussion. Thanks!

[KiwiJJ]

Hi Dmitry,
As this is a GFS backup to tape there is just the .vbk file for the file server but also .vbk's for all the other VM's on tape as well

thanks,

John

[KiwiJJ]

Looking back over this thread I see that the restore of a single file from tape will take days

Not good enough for an enterprise backup solution. I also see that this feature has been requested for years and yet still nothing. As you would be aware from the majority of comments in this thread single file restore is what all of your customers want. And timely restore of files is a basic requirement for a backup product.

[DGrinev]

That's correct, you cannot perform file level restore from backup on tape at the moment.
This feature is on our radar, but there is no estimated time I can give you.
We are always listening cautiously to the community needs and do our best to implement solutions. Thanks!

[AlexB82]

+1 for enhancing this restore functionality. We have file servers that are 6-9TB each, and it's a pain to restore the entire VM to a repository just to grab one odd excel file, especially when the end user isn't sure of when they lost it or made changes. It can take a week sometimes to load enough restore points to get their file back, which is especially annoying when the customer is bugging you constantly as it's "only one small file they need".

[pronto]

+1

+1 for enhancing this restore functionality. We have file servers that are 6-9TB each, and it's a pain to restore the entire VM to a repository just to grab one odd excel file, especially when the end user isn't sure of when they lost it or made changes. It can take a week sometimes to load enough restore points to get their file back, which is especially annoying when the customer is bugging you constantly as it's "only one small file they need".

I agree with that. We are currently running a test to restore the data to the backup server before writing it to tape with a file to tape backup but this is as much nonsense as recovering multiple terabytes to get one file from the backup. I can still hope not to need a backup up to tape so often but hope is what the theologians usually do...

Thx & Bye Tom

[amo368]

So how is everyone getting around this issue? We just bought Veeam, assuming that it would be able to do this since every other backup software in the world just about does that's worth a crap. Being able to restore a single file from a tape is absolutely necessary in our business and we are now stuck with a pile of software that doesn't work for us...

Any clever workarounds for this? Our ultimate goal is to do a VM backup to disk, use that backup to backup a full to tape each week and be able to restore a single file from those tapes...

[agrob]

well in my opinion there arte two "options"

1. reserve the needed amount of free disk space that you are able restore the biggest backup back from tape to this diskspace. then you are able to restore single items from there.
2. most of the restores requests we have are from our file servers and most of these restores are from recovery points from the last half year. we will plan a big enouth backup repo to hold restore points for 6 months for those fileservers on disk. if we need to restore files older than half a year (i guess less then 10% are older than one year) we still have to restore the whole vm.

but i agree, veeam should bring another solution here to restore directly from tape...

[Ioannis.T]

Hi amo368 ,
Can you please to which solutions are you referring that already does this? I am really interesting to check it out.
We also have Backup Exec and it does not support it. It must stage the VMDK first to a disk and then extract the file.

On one of the file servers we have we perform a file based backup through the agent, not a VM based. So the files are restored directly through tape. This is an another solution, although it might not be suitable for all cases.

Thanks

[csydas]

but i agree, veeam should bring another solution here to restore directly from tape...

Out of curiosity, how would you see this working? We use tape heavily in our environment, but both myself and my systems engineer are pretty familiar with tape and its benefits/limitations. For us, Tape is purely archival since you can't really seek properly on magnetic media like you can with an HDD or SSD. As is such, our SLAs are adjusted 100% to let our org know that once something hits the tape retention, they're in for a wait.

Speaking just physically, a tape can't randomly seek like an HDD can, it can only sequentially read, and given that, you can't really do any dynamic operations with the data residing on a magnetic medium like a tape. You need to get it to a medium that allows for random I/O. When data is encapsulated within some other container (a vmdk or a vbk, or both), how do you see the software handling this? Personally I just cannot envision how this would even work without just absolutely murdering the tape medium with random seeks.

[andyrbates]

I have been testing backing up to AWS VTL and the solution looked great ... until you need to do a restore and have to restore the whole tape which could mean downloading 100s of GB of data to just restore one small file. This definitely needs to be investigated as would make AWS a far more attractive option.

[Peteh]

I have a rather large file server VM (9TB). I keep 14 daily restore points on disk. I take weekly, monthly, yearly tape backups. I just had a request to restore a folder from beyond the 14 day retention on disk. So I got the appropriate tapes from storage, and imported them back into the LTO 6 library. I started the restore to repository job, and it took 28 hours to copy the file back to the repository, and then only several minuets to do the actual folder restore. This is really unacceptable in the real world. Is there any plan to improve the performance of tape backups and restores. I am used to a competitors product, having only recently switched to Veeam. This whole restore would have only taken a few hours with that product. I am not happy with the tape functionality in Veeam.

[Gostev]

Hi, Peter.

With our image-level backup architecture, we see tape as an archival media, restores from which are supposed to be extremely rare and have the corresponding SLA attached. As such, currently there are no plans to deliver file-level recovery directly from tape for image-level backups.

However, have you considered backing up your large file server with the File to Tape job instead? This job type creates tape backups which support fast file-level restores from tape - exactly what you are looking for. Please, do check it out and let us know.

Thanks!