Backing up huge filesytems directly to tape

[mtav]

Hello,

i wanted to ask if anyone has day to day experience with backing up very large filesystems (like SMB shares from a Windows machine) with Veeam directly to tape?

What we plan to do is:

- Make an initial backup of a large Windows fileshare (about 120 TB, more than 200 mio files)
- After the inital backup do a incremential backup each day
- After about a year make a new Backup of the complete share
- Continue with the daily incremential backup
- ...

How well can Veeam handle an incremential backup on such huge fileshares? It would be possible for me to exclude some parent directories from the incremential backup so Veeam does not have to search through the 200 mio files...

Kind regards

[david.domask]

Hi mtav,

I've moved your topic to our Tape forums as the questions are more oriented about the tape handling of file shares.

File to Tape engine was improved in v12 to support file shares better. Check the System Requirements here first for your planning (our Veeam Calculators can also help with planning)

Size correctly as per the User Guide and the backups will be fine.

Exclusions are supported via Filters. You can export / import the filter lists as needed if you're doing multiple jobs from same shares that will need the same exclusions.

[vmtech123]

This is going to take a LONG time.

Using 8 LTO8 tapes at each site and several 100TB jobs take me over 24 hours using all the drives. so if you are not streaming multiple drives (at full speed) you will have issues. You could get around this doing weekly backups or something like that instead of daily.

File to tape will be slower than large files. You could TAR or ZIP it so you don't have 200m files. That is often what I do for data I need to archive. Within reason.

VM backup to tape is also an option. It will run a drive at full speed. 200TB will still take a long time, and to restore files you need to restore back to the repo.

Are you doing NASBackup to disk first? or planning straight to tape? If it's the latter, are you pre-paired for the VUL count this job requires?