How are you using tape?

[ejenner]

I'm at the beginning of activating our backup to tape element of our 3-2-1 strategy and I'm finding it quite awkward to design / setup.

I have a 22 tape autoloader with a LTO 6 drive.

I've done one backup so far. According to the Veeam report it has spread 67TB over 6 tapes... meaning it has put 11tb on each tape... which sounds impossible?

My existing Veeam B&R server has hundreds of jobs defined for standard disk backups so I decided to deploy a fresh version of B&R on the server which is directly connected to the tape autoloader. Performance wise that seems to be working well as I'm seeing 'target at 90%' meaning the tape drive is the bottleneck.

So where I'm struggling is what to target for backup. Should I target the original jobs or the backup copies. And if I only want 7 days on tape how do I configure an automated job which would do that?

At the moment it seems like I've had to point the tape job at a specific backup copy file on the repository where I keep my copies. As those files are changing all the time it isn't a viable configuration. Sooner or later that file will be deleted by the automated backup copy retention settings and I've no way of targeting the latest backup copy files without manually creating a new job every day.

So I'm doing it wrong. Anyone else have a suggestion for the correct way to design this kind of tape backup scenario?

[Dima P.]

Hi EJ,

I've done one backup so far. According to the Veeam report it has spread 67TB over 6 tapes... meaning it has put 11tb on each tape... which sounds impossible?

Was that backup to tape job? Can you share (maybe via PM) the details of the report?

Should I target the original jobs or the backup copies.

I'd say you should tape the backup files from the repository that is closer to your tape library (to eliminate the unnecessary traffic).

And if I only want 7 days on tape how do I configure an automated job which would do that?

Create backup to tape job, target it to simple media pool with the 7 days retention. In the backup to tape job properties enableProcess latest full backup chain only option to make sure that you will tape out only the last backup chain in case of periodic full backups in the disk jobs.