One time full backup then archive to tapes

[erille]

Hello,

I'm new to Veeam backup and would appreciate some help doing what I suppose is simple for everybody else.

My task is to create a job to backup old powered off unused VMs (from VMWare) and then archive the backup to tapes.

I've read the Veeam documentation but before creating my job I have questions:

• The servers are already in other backup jobs: Is there any way I can just select the latest full backup for each server and put it in a Tape job ? If the answer is no then I undestand I must create a new dedicated job.

For this new one time VM backup job:

• On the storage options what should be the retention policy ? (I was going to select 1 restor point)

• Do I have to use the GFS rentention policy and if yes what should be the settings ? (I was going to select the option and select the Keep yearly full backup for 1 year and use June full backup)

Don't hesitate to tell me if I'm doint it all wrong and thanks in advance for any help you can provide

Regards.

[david.domask]

Hi Emmanuel, welcome to the forums!

There are several ways you can do this which you've already noted here, and let me elaborate on both options:

1. Use existing backup jobs to tape-out the servers

You can simply add the existing primary VM backup job to a tape job and it will tape-out all of the machines added to the job. I'm guessing you will remove these VMs from the primary backup job once the tape-out completes, and the tape job will respond just fine with this. This should actually work with both Simple and GFS Media Pools.

Question: will you be decommissioning these servers after you successfully tape out? If so, I recommend on the primary backup job enable Retention for Deleted Items. This is mostly relevant if you use GFS Media Pools as GFS will be looking for newer backups as it runs.

2. Create a one-time VM backup job as you described; if this is really meant to be a one-time backup + tape-out of the servers, I would not even worry about the retention [see note 0 however]: just set up the job, let it run once to produce active fulls. Assuming the primary job ran without issue, you can simply create a Backup to Tape Job, add the one-time VM backup job as a source for the tape job, and let the tape job run. Once done, you'll have a tape copy of these VMs.

3. (optional and not recommended) You can always use a File to Tape job and just add an existing full backup (.VBK) for each machine you want to tape out. This is probably easiest and fastest to set up, and there's no real problem with it, just the recovery from tape is a little different. File to tape option is not inferior, but restoring from Backup to Tape job is a bit nicer experience in my opinion as there are a few additional features when using Backup to Tape.

I've written a bit here, and truthfully you had everything correct in your initial post Let us know if this helps or if further clarification is needed.

0 - Normally there is a minimum restore point requirement for Backup to Tape; however if it's truly a "one-off" run, the first run should grab all the VBK files as expected. Subsequent runs of the tape job would require the minimum restore points on disk

[erille]

Hello,

First thanks for your reply and information, very useful.

1. The primary backup job contains a lot of other servers so I can't use it directly to backup to tapes. (or there is an option where you can select specific vm from the job ?).

Yes I will decommissioned the servers, thanks for the info about Retention for deleted items.
I understand this option will delete backups for deleted item only that have no new backup for a defined period of time.
So just to confirm if I activate this option on the primary backup job, VM items that are still present but with a last backup date like 1 year old or more will not be deleted right ?

More info from what I've seen:

Some servers in my target list have never been backed up. I can see that those servers are running on different ESX that the one that have VM backed up every day.
So I suspect it could be a licence thing like we don't have enough Veeam licences for those ESX (but I don't know how to confirm this/how the licence works, I just remember the previous engineer talking about moving licences...). Having no previous backup for those VM is not an issue ?

[david.domask]

Hi Emmanuel,

You are very welcome, glad I could help a bit!

1. Correct, Backup to Tape works with Jobs or a Repository as source, there is not a way to take specific machines from a backup with many at this time.
2. The Deleted item retention indeed will only work on items no longer being actively processed by the job. For example, suppose you have a job with a tag as a source -- the tag has 10 VMs in it. One of the VMs needs to be rebuilt completely, so you delete it from the Hypervisor, recreate the VM, and add it to the tag. Starting on the next job run, Veeam will know that the old VM is no longer present (it will try to find it) and will produce a warning on this run that the VM could not be processed. Subsequent runs where the VM is still not accessible will be an Informational (green) message. If you have Deleted Item Retention enabled, after the Deleted Item Retention period is met if the original VM (that was deleted) is not returned, Deleted Item Retention will remove the backups just for that VM.
3. For the VMs not being backed up, that sounds like a separate issue, and I'd open a Support Case and let Veeam Support review the jobs where the VMs weren't backed up. Remember to include logs for the affected jobs (use the 1st radio option, and select the affected jobs. You can ctrl+click or Shift+Click to select individual or a range of jobs respectively).

Thanks!