Only the Last 3 Full Backups on "File to Tape"

[Max93]

Hello and Happy New Year

We are using Veeam Backup & Replication v12.3.2.4165 and want to perform an annual backup of our data. Until now, we have always used “File to Tape” and simply copied all backups to the tapes.

Our storage requirements have grown significantly, so we now only want to back up the last 3 full backups of each workstation and server.
Unfortunately, in the Veeam GUI, you can only select “last full backup” and there is no option for “last 3 full backups.”

Manually selecting all files would take over 48 hours, which is obviously not practical...

Our backups are stored on two different drives.

Is there a simpler or automated solution to copy only the last 3 full backups per server to tape?

Thank you in advance for your advice!

Best regards,
Max

[david.domask]

Hi Max93,

I've moved your topic to our Tape forum as it's more of a question about Tape backups.

> Unfortunately, in the Veeam GUI, you can only select “last full backup” and there is no option for “last 3 full backups.”

Are you talking about the Process latest full backup chain only option linked here or which option are you referring to?

For a one-off annual backup, I can only think of a pre-job script solution that would be applicable to manually add the files in one-go, but depending on if you're on v12 or v13 the script will be very different as File to Tape jobs were changed in v13 to only accept Unstructured Data sources as a source for File to Tape jobs.

If you let me know which version you're on, I can try to help with a sample script for v13.