Media sets, retention, and offline tapes?

[berryc]

Hi All,

I'm wondering if someone could help shed some light on the behavior of my current setup, and what I might be doing incorrectly? I've created 3 file to tape backup jobs, storing to an AWS storage gateway VTL. Each media set and file to tape job are created the same with these settings.

Media sets:
- 4 tapes assigned to media set
- Create new media set for every backup session
- Do not protect data (cyclically overwrite tapes as required)

File to tape jobs:
- Perform a full backup once a week
- Eject media upon job completion is enabled
- Export current media set upon job completion is enabled, and set for every day

I set it up like this assuming all 4 tapes would be used, 1 a week, and once they were all used the oldest tape would be reused and overwritten, effectively giving backups of the past 4 weeks. This past weekend was the 5th week, and the file to tape jobs run on the weekend. I checked this morning and the jobs are in a "WaitingTape" status. So what am I doing wrong here, why is the oldest tape not being overwritten?

[Dima P.]

Hello berryc,

Was the tape media inserted back to the library? If it was - you need to inventory it (otherwise it will be sitting in offline state). Cheers!

[berryc]

Hi Dima, thank you for the reply, I'm not sure if the tape media was inserted back into the library. This is my first time working with tape, and virtual tape in this case, so I'm not too familiar with the entire process. I would suspect it was not inserted back into the library though. Thank you for the pointer, I'll look into the documentation for Veeam and AWS Storage Gatways further to figure out what I did incorrectly.

[Dima P.]

You are welcome! By the way, take a look at this white paper as you may find it useful Veeam Backup & Replication using AWS VTL Gateway - Deployment Guide. Cheers!