Backup Office 365 to Tape?

[finsfree]

I have Veeam Backup & Replication. I also have a trail version of Veeam Office 365 Backup that I'm trying out.

After making a couple of successful Veeam Office 365 Backups, how do I take that local Backup and back it up to a Tape? I don't see anywhere in VOB where I can add a tape backup.

Should I just use VBR to make a tape backup job and use "files to tape" and point it to the VOB repository folder?

It's great to have a local copy of Office 365, but I want to back it up to tape.

[Mike Resseler]

Hey finsfree,

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 cannot backup to tape. What you can do, is create a backup from the VBO machine with VBR (if it is a virtual one) or with VAW (if it is a physical one) and protect that to tape.
Note that VBR will discover that this backup is effectively a VBO server, and will give you item-level recovery from that backup also. So you don't need to restore the entire VBO machine, you can do item-level recovery from the virtual or physical backup

Cheers
M/

[finsfree]

The machine I'm using for Veeam backups is a physical machine. Hmmm...VAW, I haven't used that product yet. I have never backed up a phyical server w/ Veeam yet.

Thanks for confirming this with me.

[DE&C]

Why not take this on the roadmap. For customer with higher retention (1year+) and PB of Data this can be an option. Your solution already uses a "cache" tier for object storage. So why not use tape and there put the items in "archives" (like you do with the 1MB blocks for object storage) and write it to tape. If you need any of it back, it can be first written to the cache tier and then restore it.

- cache tier
- object stoage for x years (0.5, 1 etc.)
- Tape for x-y years

Your solution with the "backup the server with VBR" doesn't work with object storage (doesn't matter if it's a physical server or a VM).

[nielsengelen]

No plans for tape support for now. We had more request for object storage support compared to tape hence why it was introduced first. We are however looking at several options for long term archiving but no ETA can be given for those.

[DE&C]

@Niels: I agree with you. From my opinion object storage will be much more important in the future then tape

For me this would be more a "nice to have" thing for customer that still have tape infrastructure and want to use it. What I saw in a RFQ that the customer has written "tape" as a must. There we had no chance with VOB, because we couldn't use tape directly from VOB.

[Edwin009]

I have Veeam Backup & Replication. I also have a trail version of Veeam Office 365 Backup that I'm trying out.

After making a couple of successful Veeam Office 365 Backups, how do I take that local Backup and back it up to a Tape? I don't see anywhere in VOB where I can add a tape backup.

Should I just use VBR to make a tape backup job and use "files to tape" and point it to the VOB repository folder?

It's great to have a local copy of Office 365, but I want to back it up to tape.

To begin; are you already running and have correctly configured the following components?

• Veeam Backup and Replication;
• Veeam Tape Infrastructure;
• Veeam Backup for Office 365 Installed and Configured.

[nielsengelen]

@Edwin009 looks like your answer isn’t complete?

[Gseehomie]

Hey finsfree,

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 cannot backup to tape. What you can do, is create a backup from the VBO machine with VBR (if it is a virtual one) or with VAW (if it is a physical one) and protect that to tape.
Note that VBR will discover that this backup is effectively a VBO server, and will give you item-level recovery from that backup also. So you don't need to restore the entire VBO machine, you can do item-level recovery from the virtual or physical backup

Cheers
M/

Hey Guys, it's been some time since I've been asking questions in the comminity forum and it feels refreshing to still see some of the same "faces" around! Right now our company is in the concept phase for VBO365 and we're facing the same described "problem" as described in this topic. Just some quick follow up questions:
- Our "normal" VBR-Backups are done to a NFS-share on a NAS, our weekly backups to tape are based on "backup jobs" within VBR. The idea would be to backup to the same NFS-share on the NAS with VBO and do a weekly backup to tape with the "files to tape" option from the NFS-share to Tape. Would this be possible or would the file always be "in use" and you can't do a backup that way? (please with a quick explanation if it's not possible) Would it change something if the O365 backup was done by a different proxy than the VBO server itself?
- I think making a Backup of the VBO-machine to tape wouldnt solve our problem as the backup wouldn't be on the VBO-machine but in the NFS-share. What would be the correct way to backup this data to tape?
- Would it make a difference if we'd backup to a different type of storage?

I'm just looking for the recommended way of doing a regular backup to tape if the backup-target for VBOO365 is for example on a NFS-Share.

What would be the modern approach instead of using tapes for long time retention with VBO365?

Best regards and many thanks!
Tizian

[juankax]

Hello,
I was looking for the same thing, thanks for the answers.

[zlep]

You can backup an O365 repository with VBR on tape, if you stop the services "Veeam.Archiver.Service" and "Veeam.Archiver.Proxy" before backup and restart the after files have been written to tape.
Just use the "Job scripts" in Options/Advanced in your tape job. Plan those jobs carefully, they should not overlap in time!

Code: Select all

sc stop Veeam.Archiver.Service
sc stop Veeam.Archiver.Proxy

Code: Select all

sc start Veeam.Archiver.Proxy
sc start Veeam.Archiver.Service

ATTENTION!
If your tape job hangs, for no free tapes for example, O365 services will not be restarted and VBO will not run!


So it's a suboptimal solution, but as long as VBO does not use VBR repositories or its own backup to tape function.....

[Andreas Neufert]

If your tape job hangs, for no free tapes for example, O365 services will not be restarted and VBO will not run!

You can create another script and start it with Windows Scheuler before your backup window. That way VBO will always be executed even if the VBR job do not work correctly.

[rbrinkmann]

I'll try

- pre script stopping services - zip o365 backup folder - start services
- actual backup of the zip file
- post script deleting zip

[Jeggsy]

Hi all,
This is just the thread I've been looking for....
We have been running VBR for years and now just got Veeam for O365. For VBR, we do our full weekly and daily incrementals to disk and then take a weekly/monthly/yearly copy to tape.
Just getting stuck into Veeam for O365 and couldn't find any mention of tape backups and this thread has just confirmed it.
For us it would be a massive plus to have tape support within Veeam for O365 ! !
I know tape is seen as a bit old fashioned these days but for us it works a treat and is an easy medium to keep off-site copies of.

[Mike Resseler]

Jeggsy,

The thing about VBO is that is doesn't store data as "flat" files but it is a running database. So incrementals to tape will not be possible in this case. Are you using a JET DB repository or a Object Storage repository for VBO?

[nscblauensteiner]

No plans for tape support for now. We had more request for object storage support compared to tape hence why it was introduced first. We are however looking at several options for long term archiving but no ETA can be given for those.

Is it possible to estimate when it will be possible to integrate a tape infrastructure into VBO365?
Br, Lukas

[Polina]

Hi Lukas,

It's not likely to come soon. Currently, the workaround is to use tape capabilities in VBR.