Discussions related to exporting backups to tape and backing up directly to tape.
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john.aubrey
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Tape Transfer Sizes?

Post by john.aubrey »

Hello,
We just started using Veeam 2 weeks ago. Our first tape backup we transferred 22 TB of information. This is about what we use on our SAN for the VM's. This past weekend our tapes only transferred 5.7 TB. I have all the disk jobs to synthetic backups on Friday night, and saturday, we start the tape backups. I want to get all the data needed to restore the VM on tapes every weekend. I don't feel this is happening with the low amount of data that was transferred this weekend.

I don't have the "Archive incremental backups to tape" checked. I check my jobs under the Backups, and it shows there was a full backup on Friday night.
john.aubrey
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Re: Tape Transfer Sizes?

Post by john.aubrey »

Did some more investigation. The first week didn't have 5 work days of backups, some had 5 some had 3 some had 2..... What i'm trying to understand is, could this be the disk savings of the job based dedup showing up now? I opened up the tape job, and the backups list the 5.7 TB as the total for Full (plus 554 GB incremental). I restored some items from tape, threw it in an application group and sure backup verified it, server started up. That wouldn't have been possible if it was just an incremental on it. On the "action" it lists "Processing full backup of "Job1"". This is just what I'm thinking.
Dima P.
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Re: Tape Transfer Sizes?

Post by Dima P. »

Hello John,
I want to get all the data needed to restore the VM on tapes every weekend. I don't feel this is happening with the low amount of data that was transferred this weekend.
Please clarify how source jobs are configured (i.e forever forward incremental / forward incremental with periodic full backup / reverse incremental) and what type of tape job you've been using (file to tape / backup to tape or backup to tape with GFS media pool set as a target)?
I restored some items from tape, threw it in an application group and sure backup verified it, server started up. That wouldn't have been possible if it was just an incremental on it. On the "action" it lists "Processing full backup of "Job1"".
Whenever you restore incremental restore point from tape to disk we automatically add to restore list entire backup chain till the full backup to make sure restore point fully operational. Check the restore location on disk to verify that: you should see a backup chain of vbk+vib+...+vib is we are talking about forward incremental backup mode. Cheers!
john.aubrey
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Re: Tape Transfer Sizes?

Post by john.aubrey »

Hello,
Sorry for delay in responding.

We do incremental backups to disk every night, with synthetic full backups on Friday nights. We don't do any full backups. Our weekend backup to tape just backup the backup jobs.

When I look at what is restored from tape after it write, I have a .vbm file that is a couple KB, and a VBK file that is GB in size.

Sounds like I might need to enable the "archive incremental backups to tape" option then?
veremin
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Re: Tape Transfer Sizes?

Post by veremin »

Can you elaborate on what you're trying to achieve? If you only want to have weekly full on tapes, then, current configuration should suffice. Otherwise (if you also want to archive incremental restore points), enable the corresponding option.

The reason for stats discrepancies, might have been the fact that during initial run tape job archived all full backups that it found for backup chain, while subsequent run it processed only one newly created weekly full backup.

Thanks!
john.aubrey
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Re: Tape Transfer Sizes?

Post by john.aubrey »

My goal is to have everything needed to restore a server on a tape. I want to do syn. full backups Friday, write it to tape on Saturday, and then if I ever need to restore back from tape, I can with just that tape. I'm not worried about M-Th backups, just that last backup on Friday. I don't want to rely on any other tape, other then the one I wrote last Saturday to restore a folder.

Thank You!
soncscy
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Re: Tape Transfer Sizes?

Post by soncscy »

Hey John,
I don't want to rely on any other tape, other then the one I wrote last Saturday to restore a folder.
Gonna be the one to ask here: Are you expecting you can do a File Level Restore from VM backups on tape?

You can do this, but only after you've staged the backup file on a repository first. VM backup to tape is meant for VM restores, not File Level Restores from within the VMs.

Since your new to Veeam, maybe you're thinking that everything is in-guest still like with other solutions, but Veeam VM backups are image level, from the Hypervisor. Once it's on tape, you can't do the usual restore option until the VM is off tape first.

If you're wanting File Restores from Tape, you need to add the server as a Managed Server in Veeam first, and then you can add that as a source for File to Tape Jobs (which will let you do File/Folder Restores)
john.aubrey
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Re: Tape Transfer Sizes?

Post by john.aubrey »

My understanding, and from my testing, I have it set up how I want it (how I believe at least). You take the tape, put it into a tape drive. Then you use Veeam to restore it (the job data, which can consist of multiple VM's) to the disk storage we use for nightly backups. From there, you can restore the actual VM's back to a hypervisor and turn them on. I understand that I can't just go from tape to files. We are ok with that. Restore time from tape isn't our most important item for tape backups.
veremin
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Re: Tape Transfer Sizes?

Post by veremin »

My goal is to have everything needed to restore a server on a tape. I want to do syn. full backups Friday, write it to tape on Saturday, and then if I ever need to restore back from tape, I can with just that tape. I'm not worried about M-Th backups, just that last backup on Friday. I don't want to rely on any other tape, other then the one I wrote last Saturday to restore a folder.
In this case your current configuration looks good and you don't need to enable additional settings (process incremental backups).

If you can restore VM from backups stored on tapes, I would not worry about the said statistics - as I've said, it might be because different number of backups were copied by tape job during its initial and subsequent runs.

Thanks!
john.aubrey
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Re: Tape Transfer Sizes?

Post by john.aubrey » 1 person likes this post

Thanks everyone for helping me with this. Veeam is an incredible product, and the level of support is far above anything I've come across.
veremin
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Re: Tape Transfer Sizes?

Post by veremin »

Thank you, John, for your kind words.

Should you still be not sure about the amount of processed data, kindly, reach our support team for further investigation - on the paper your existing configuration looks valid and answers your tape backup requirements perfectly.

Thanks!
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