How to break job-to-tape backup into chunks?

[mikeely]

I've got a pretty large (slightly over 2TB) batch of weekly .vbk I want to copy off to tape (actually to S3 Glacier but I am trying to approach this from the backup-to-tape perspective). The problem is that the size of the backup consistently overwhelms the maximum cache size of the tape gateway which then slows the backup to an absolute crawl, at least until it get stepped on by or steps on a regular backup job.

What I'd like to do is break the -to-tape portion up into chunks. I can do a backup files to tape but that does no good as the VBKs are all going to have different names each time. What approaches can I take? Ideally I'd write something in bash or perl or such to trigger Veeam to send a list of files to the tape gateway... something tells me I'm about to learn all about the AWS APIs.

[csydas]

Hey Mike,

Maybe I'm just out of the loop technically since we still use good ole' fashioned magnetic tapes for our archives, but how big is the cache on your gateway? Are you talking about this here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/storagegate ... cepts.html

The numbers seem pretty simple - 20% of the total workload, right? As I see it, you just have two options -- split the job up smaller or increase your cache. I'm not sure there's even a need for API work.

Else, you can do masks within File to Tape jobs and just include .VBK files (I'm assuming you're doing Forever Forward Incremental/Reverse Incremental backups).

[mikeely]

I've built the cache as big as 2TB, which is the maximum size for the AWS gateway. Still no joy.

[Dima P.]

Hi Mike,

Can you split your big backup file into several smaller ones by using separate vm backup jobs? Thanks!

[mikeely]

I'd love to, but that big backup is basically "backup this big datastore excepting the following VMs. That way when we add a VM it gets backed up right away.

[Dima P.]

Mike,

The only suggestion that comes to my mind is to use StartWind VTL instead of Amazon Gateway VTL as it does not have any limit on the storage for emulated media.