Feature Request: Pause or Hold a Backup to Tape Job

[Kennea]

Good Morning All!

We are running v8 (8.0.0.917) and I ran into a bit of an issue:
Our Monthly backup filled up the available tapes and went into a "Waiting for inventory" state. In an attempt to add more space for the job, I was stuck!
According to Veeam the tape drive was locked as "in use" and would not unlock to allow more tapes to erased and added to the inventory, thus allowing the Backup to Tape job to complete.

It would be great if there was a function to pause or suspend a Backup to Tape job, telling Veeam to release the tape drive for other functions. That way if a job was to run out of resources the admin could
insert new tapes to the library, erase them if need be and then resume the job.

currently the job can ONLY be stopped which means you are forced to lose the work done and start it over after enough space has been made available to accommodate the ENTIRE job run a second time...

In summary:
A pause or suspend feature for Backup to Tape jobs.

Kenneth Allen

[Dima P.]

Hello Kenneth,

Perfect request, thank you! I’ll bring it to the next feature request meeting.

[sylvain]

Good day,

Was this feature ever discussed internally at Veeam, and my has it been added to the v9 release ?

I agree with Kenneth, it really is painful to have to re run an entire backup just because there are no way to tell Veeam that you actually provided another tape.

Thank you
Sylvain

[rreed]

+1 for this for same/similar reasons please.

[gparker]

+1 from me too! I'm running Veeam v9.0.0.1491 connected to a single tape drive (not a library) and when a tape becomes full and I eject it and load in a new tape, Veeam won't let me do a drive inventory because "all drives are busy". In my scenario, it's pointless for me to cancel the job just so I can do an inventory and restart the job because the amount of data in the tape job requires more than one tape.
Help!

[CamoPoP]

Guys is there a fix to this issue? Currently on latest v9.5 and can still not pause tape backups as mentioned above by gparker. Do any Veeam admins look at these posts?

[Dima P.]

Hello and welcome to the community forums Nick.

Can you please clarify your setup? Thank you in advance.

[CamoPoP]

Hi Dima
Server 2012 R2 with Vcenter 6
Veeam 9.5.0.1536 with HP 1x8 G2 Autoloader tape drive.

We run one weekly tape backup job which uses less than 3 LTO-5 tapes each time. Sometimes however we may get a large amount of additional data which requires an additional tape. This job runs over the weekend so when I arrive back to the office on a Monday and see the prompt for an additional tape I want to be able to simply put the job on hold while I place a new tape in the drive, run an inventory and erase function before resuming the job again. At this stage you cannot do this you can only stop the job (effectivley cancelling) and leaving no choice but to run it all over again. Hoping for a fix to this, is there something I'm missing or a way to get around this?

Cheers

[Dima P.]

Thanks for the clarification Nick. If a drive is occupied by backup or restore activity it cannot be used for other tasks. Added your vote to this feature request.

[Ian Kmec]

We run daily uploads to the cloud using a tape library setup. Having the ability to temporarily stop and restart these jobs will be significantly more productive than what we are currently doing which ends up being failing the job then restarting that same upload creating unnecessary duplication of data. Can you please consider this for your next update release of VEEAM 9.5?

[Dima P.]

Hello and welcome to the community Ian,

May I ask why you would like to pause the tape job? To limit the network usage during emulated tape media upload (if read correctly you are using vtl to ship emulated tape media to S3)? Thanks!

[eugeneA]

Hi,

It would be very useful especially while running monthly tape backup job. For instance, it takes 2 days for me to backup file server onto tape library and I cannot run regular daily backup for that server during that period. If we had a pause button, I could simply pause the tape job, run the regular job and resume tape job once regular incremental job is complete.

Is anyone else running into this issue or is it just me?

Regards,
Eugene

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums. I split your question away from the old topic as it it more tape specific.

If I understood you correctly, then setting Prevent this job from being interrupted by source backup jobs should do the job

Best regards,
Hannes

[Sloan]

I could use a pause feature for file to tape jobs.

I have a tape job that runs into the day, but I sometimes have an application group who needs to write a backup to disk for some upgrade or fix during the day. They end up waiting for hours to proceed to their next step while their backup runs. I can kill my tape job and their performance improves, but then I have to start over with my tape job. Then there is much glaring and pointing of fingers from the management level as to why everything didn't complete. Then heaven forbid somebody happens to ask "Can't netbackup or networker pause a tape job? Have we looked into them?" Then I spend weeks explaining again why Veeam is better!

Save me Veeam! Let me pause a tape job.

[Dima P.]

Thanks for the feedback Sloan. I've added your vote to this feature request. Cheers!

[thomas.biesmans]

A pause or quick resume feature would be lovely to perform maintenance

[Dima P.]

Hello Thomas,

Mind me asking what maintenance window you have in mind? I.e. for how long you would need to pause the tape job? Thanks!

[thomas.biesmans]

Hey Dima,

In this case it was moving a VBRCatalog, so about 30-40 minutes in all. In other cases it's often a reboot or a version update.

Currently I do something like the regular backup job's functionality (which might be a good middle road), where you can choose an immediate or graceful stop: regularly checking how far along the current Backup Job in a Backup to Tape job is, stopping it when he starts a new one (if time permits, because often this is half way through the biggest job...). This way the job can continue after maintenance with the leftovers, while not wasting too much offload time. Having that functionality in an automated fashion would be good, but having a true pause would still be better of course. ;D

[Dima P.]

Thomas,

Got it! Thanks for the feedback, I've added that to the feature request.

[mdsullivan]

Will a pause feature be implemented. We have been encountering issues with L9 media humidity sensitivity. I would like to be able via powershell to pause a job so that we can allow a monitoring device to stop and start jobs when there is an HVAC issue otherwise we have to restart a job that can take days.

[robrev6]

Hello, just wanted to add my vote to this feature request. This seems like very basic functionality that is missing. I have a Dell TL1000 Tape Library that i use for my tape jobs. I currently have a tape job running that takes multiple days to complete. I need to grab some tapes created earlier in the week that have nothing to do with the current tape job to run them over to the media vault, but I cannot do so because I can't pause the current job. Should I have removed them prior to starting this long tape job? Probably. But there are times I'm working remotely where that is not an option. I would love the ability to pause the current tape job for about 20 minutes while I swap out some tapes that aren't related to the currently running job so they will be ready for a scheduled tape job happening over the weekend.