Backup file bigger than tape size?

[evander]

I feel like this a stupid question and have tried googling but just cant find a definitive answer.

I'm setting up a new tape environment, Dell ML3 Tape Library with LTO9 tapes.
LTO 9 only has native ~18TB with up to 45TB compressed.
My understanding is because Veeam backups are already compressed we are basically looking at max 18TB (in reality prob only ~16,4TB) of usable space on each tape.

My question is: I have VMs that are many TBs in size and the resulting backups of these VMs, which is currently going to disk, has VBK files in excess of 18TB (after the Veeam default compression and dedup). Repos are ReFS and XFS which give great space savings but the repos are still over 30+TB
I also have NAS backup shares that are 35TB+ in size. Those repos are 60+TBs

I suspect the NAS backup to tape can be split between disks as they are not one big VBK file, but I dont believe its possible to split a VBK file so how does Veeam handle this to a 18TB tape?

Hoping its possible and I will now happily be educated on tape

Edit: All backups are per-machine mode

[Dima P.]

Hello evander,

Files larger that single tape media are split into chunks, so on file part is stored on the first tape, second on the second tape etc. Thank you!

[evander]

Thank you. I am still to run this big job so will test when I am able to.

Much appreciated.