GFS Tape - Restore Point Selection

[redhorse]

Hello,

we have a GFS tape job with a media pool configured for daily incrementals and weekly full.

Now, we had an issue with our tape drive and had no daily backups for two days. After reparining the tape drive we had a regular run of the tape job and I am surprised that the job didn't copy the missing VIBs to tape but instead creates a virtuall full for the current day for the daily media set.

So, we have:

Saturday - weekly full
Sunday - no backup (failure)
Monday - no backup (failure)
Tuesday - daily (but vbk of the current day instad of vibs from Sunday and Monday)

The source job is a forward incremental job with weekly full and 14 restore points, so that shouldn't be an issue.

Thanks for your feedback and help!

[redhorse]

Additional Info:

I've checked the logs and I've seen the following line:

[18.02.2025 22:00:29.199] <18> Info (3) [CTapeGFSBackupJobStorageBuilder] Last GFS to Tape job enable time(18.02.2025 13:23:07) used as min storage creation time

I've started the tape job manually at 18.02.2025 13:23:27 but aborted it due to the tape drive issue and no restore points were left in the catalogue from this try. Despite this Veeam uses this manual tape job run as a starting point and creates a VBK to ensure that the chain is complete. I don't see any hints in the console log and I've some problem to understand this behavior.

Maybe someone can clarify this?

[david.domask]

Hi redhorse,

This is expected behavior -- disabling the Tape GFS job and re-enabling it will cause it to only look for backups made _after_ the re-enable time.

The daily media set will sometimes include a Full backup if there are no full backups in the elder media sets (weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly), as an increment must link to a full backup (VBK) at some point.

So depending on retention for the _source_ job, it's possible the VIBs on disk could not be linked to the VBK on tape, and thus a full was placed in the Daily media set.

This will self-correct moving forward, but my guess based on the above is a combination of the disable/re-enable + the noted behavior of Daily Media Set led to this, and moving forward should be fine.

In the event you need to replace drives or other tape hardware, it's best to simply disable the library/drive from the Tape Infrastructure tab, and re-enable them once the repairs are complete.

[redhorse]

Hi David,

thank you for your detailed answer, that helped me to understand the behavior.