Writing to Tape Help

[AliG]

Habibalby,
Thanks for your reply, I currently have 30 restore points on Disk, and Deleted VMs on Disk Retention period to 30 days as well. I have Enable Synthetic Fulls (Forever incremental to be done on Saturday, and the check-mark to Transform previous full backup chains into rollbacks.) Then in Symantec, I have daily incremental every night and have it configured for Full backups on the First Monday of the month. The Tapes are on a 5 Week rotation. With the Full Backups which are considered my monthly kept for 1 year.

Thanks

[waldo]

Hi there.

We have been using Veeam B&R for about 6 months now and first of all I would just like to say it is a superb product! It has taken me alittle while to tweak the best possible performance out of it for my enviroment but has been worth the small effort!

In a nutshell I now want to put my old Symantec BE server back into opertation and use it to backup my veeam data. Basically so that i can archive to tape end of month, quarterly & end of year backups.

Is there anything I definitely should be doing or anything that I definitely shouldn't regarding the configuration?

All my veeam backup data is stored on a Windows Server which I use as a NAS target device in affect. This server also has the veeam proxy installed and has iSCSI connection to our iSCSI SAN (Dell EqualLogic). This means I get 'direct-SAN' backups.

Can i litterally just access the backup folders on the NAS server across the LAN from my BE2010 server and backup the veeam data?

[hoFFy]

Hello together,

I just wanted to know which software do you guys out there use to get your Veeam backups to tape?
At the moment we use for our customers BackupExec which is totally oversized for just saving some files on a tape drive. We are also testing SEP Sesam.

Do you know another simple program to safe the files on tape drives or autoloaders?

[jlyle]

Possibly Bacula (http://www.bacula.org/en/) for a free opensource alternative to spooling to tape. It still is kinda at the BE level but doesn't cost and the server is only really supported on Linux. I haven't begun to implement spooling to tape yet but I was going to try this to get off our BE licencing.

Couldn't the old ntbackup spool files off to tape too? Not sure about the new version in 2008+

[HDClown]

I am putting together a new backup strategy and my goal is to have Veeam B&R exclusively to handle the backup operaitons, going disk-to-disk.

I only intend to have enough disk space for around 1 month's worth of backups, so, I need backup's to tape as well, as my strategy has monthly/quarterly/yearly's being kept for longer terms. Since B&R cnanot drive a tape library ,I need another backup software (for new, Symantec BE). I would rather not deploy BE agents into the OS or use BEVMware agent in order to be able tobackup to tape, but rather I would like to offload the V&R datasets to tape. The idea is to offload the B&R weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly to tape.

Here's a rough example of a "1 month" cycle I intend to do:
- B&R does a weekly full + daily reverse incrementals -This is retained on disk for 4 weeks
- I need an end-of-week "full" to offload to tape
- I need an end-of-month "full" to offload to tape

Is it best if the jobs i need offloaded to tape be run as Full B&R jobs, and put those into a dedicated location for the software driving the tape to grab? Or is there something else preferrable?

Beyond the above idea of only doing the weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly to tape, is anyone writing their daily B&R data to tape, giving you a "backup of your backup" ?

Lastly, did anyone try this and have it fail miserably, and have to use agents in the OS/VMware agent from the software driving their library?

[randomb]

hello,

I have searched the forums, and read

http://forums.veeam.com/viewtopic.php?f ... ape#p70899
http://forums.veeam.com/search.php?fid[]=24
http://dailyvmtech.wordpress.com/2012/0 ... exec-2010/

We have a customer that have 30 restore points on NAS, using reverse incremental with 1 weekly active full on friday



Im wondering how can we take backup of this to tape, my considerations:

I have present the nas on the same network as the backup exec server, where i was considering to run incremental against this drive? but wouldent i end up with backuping everything with major amount of data?

what is the recommendations here?

Another idea, wouldent that be a new share on the nas, and a new repository where i run 1 full weekly and 6 other dailys ? and set the restore points to 7 total?

and make sure the backup exec runs after the full backup is done?

im a little in the dark here hence many of ourer customers would love tape to offload their vms to vaults, offsites etc

What do others do in this kind of situation?

[Vitaliy S.]

what is the recommendations here?

If you're using reversed incremental backup mode, then you need to offload VBK file to tape. If this operation takes too much time, then you can switch to forward incremental backup mode (which was was specifically implemented for such scenarios) and offload only increments on daily basis and full backup on weekends.

[habibalby]

Hi Lars,
In my opinion is to reduce the Retention period of VMs deleted from Disk & Restore points to keep on disk both to 5 Days only. If you start your backup from Sunday to Thursday as Incremental and your full active backup is on Friday, you can offload the whole backup folder of particular VM to tape and that will include Full Active Friday, Sunday ~ Thursday incremental. Backup will continue to run again on Sunday ~ till Wednesday and the previous backup chain will be removed from disk on Wednesday. This will leave you to have backup on disk only for recent week. Just make sure you offload them to tape either on Thrusday " This is what I'm doing" or some other day that suite you.

When you offload the backup to tape, you will have the whole week backup chain for particular VM and the same applies to the rest of the backup folders, provided the Restore to Keep on Disk and Deleted VMs on Disk Retention must be 5 days only.

This is how I have configured it in my environment and it works well.

Thanks,

[randomb]

Hello Habibalby

Thanks for your reply

The customer still have some physical servers yet, and a tape library so there will be running a full backup each day, and main target is i want to be able only to take out 1 tape of the time

im running full active backup on sunday and rev. incremental every other day

We have local backup with 30 restore points and this is primary to have a tape backup for DR solely

So i have adjusted it now to:

Full active sunday, rev incremental every other day and 5 restore points and rention for 5 days?

Hi Lars,
In my opinion is to reduce the Retention period of VMs deleted from Disk & Restore points to keep on disk both to 5 Days only. If you start your backup from Sunday to Thursday as Incremental and your full active backup is on Friday, you can offload the whole backup folder of particular VM to tape and that will include Full Active Friday, Sunday ~ Thursday incremental. Backup will continue to run again on Sunday ~ till Wednesday and the previous backup chain will be removed from disk on Wednesday. This will leave you to have backup on disk only for recent week. Just make sure you offload them to tape either on Thrusday " This is what I'm doing" or some other day that suite you.

When you offload the backup to tape, you will have the whole week backup chain for particular VM and the same applies to the rest of the backup folders, provided the Restore to Keep on Disk and Deleted VMs on Disk Retention must be 5 days only.

This is how I have configured it in my environment and it works well.

Thanks,

[habibalby]

Hi,
Why don't you switch to Forward Incremental? I believe it's better than Rev Incremental specially for big VMs or VMs very resources intensive.

Switching from 30 Restore points to 5 Restore points will leave you only with full week chain backup on disk.

Thanks,

[habibalby]

Hi,
To avoid backing up everything on the Repository and you want to backup only recent week or previous week, you can use the Reset Archive Bit Attribute to mark the whole backup chain that you want to backup as Ready for Archive and when you run the backup software it will backup only those files to tape, the reset of the files will be left untouched.

Thanks,

[randomb]

hello,

i like how rev. incremental Works

but besides that i see - atm ive tried running reset archive bit with full because i want the full file - but i was thinking of maybe incremental could do it?

but this project is halted a bit hence the backup data is stored on a qnap and atm backup exec sees the qnap as a server so it wants an agent and fails imminent

[randomb]

Hi,

well we got 1 job running to the primary repository and another set to after that runs to a secondary respostory to the same nas.

[Nutzer]

All,

I'm know this has been asked alot of times and need the cheetsheet on best backup solution for my environment.

I currently have my Veeam do 'Reverse Incremental' with a 7 day retention. I have BUE backup to tape using FULL backup nightly. The reason why I have it this way was I just recently implemented my new VM solution bor about 6 months ago and the consultant advise me to do it this way. As we get my VM intesive and add more and larger VM's my daily backup to tape is taking longer and longer like 10hrs for 2.5TB in the VeeamBackup folder. I know for a fact I'm not doing my backup strategy right and need to change it around.
Please confirm this is a good method.

Change my nightly Veeam Backup from 'Reverse Incremental' to 'Increment'. (Do I need to do other options like Perform Full Backup Periodically, or Synthetic Full?)
In BUE, do a FULL Backup Sunday and Incremental Monday-Friday to Tape.

Or
Keep it in 'Reverse Incremental' and In BUE, do a FULL Backup Sunday and Incremental Monday-Friday to Tape.

Please let me know what you think.

Thanks!

[veremin]

Change my nightly Veeam Backup from 'Reverse Incremental' to 'Increment'.

It's a right strategy indeed to switch from reversed to forward incremental mode in case of utilizing tape for offloading your backup-files to.

Do I need to do other options like Perform Full Backup Periodically, or Synthetic Full?

Yes, acccording to the best practice mentioned here, it’s highly-recommended to perform periodic synthetic/full backup on a weekly basis.

Hope this helps.
Thanks.

[cwhitmore]

Since Veeam doesn't support tape backups I was wondering if I can use Windows built in backup on same server as Veeam to copy Veeam backups to tape?
I already have Microsoft DPM 2012, but don't need it unless this doesn't work.

[gdekeijzer]

Hi there,

We're currently in the phase of designing a backup infrastructure using Veeam B&R 6.5
B&R will backup all our VM's to disk and then (on scheduled times) it must backup to tape(library).

We want to use 5 restorepoints (one each day) and on friday(evening) we do a full-synthetic.
So this will give:
M T W T F S S
W1: i...i...i...i...f..t..n (t=to-tape n=none)
W2: i...i...i...i...f..t..n

However, we're not certain on what is the best strategy for backing-up the files to tape.
If i understand Veeam correctly, in this plan at least 2 full backups will remain on disk, so we need 2 times the storage.

If i do a full-synthetic with the 'Tranform previous full backup...' it will create a new full backup-file (destroying the old full)
So when backing-up to tape will only backup 1 big file instead of 2.
But how will this affect my retention?

Any other suggestions on backup-tofile-totape strategy?

Regards,

Gerwin

[veremin]

Hi, Gerwin,

You’ve been merged to the existing discussion which is primarily concerned with copying to tape best practices. So, kindly see the answers provided above.

As to your scenario, it’s recommended indeed to utilize forward incremental backup mode in case of tape. Additionally, you can swap the synthetic full backup with tape job, so that, tape job will be performed on Friday and synthetic full on Saturday, accordingly.

Thus, it will be guaranteed that each week you tape job will take away only 1 Full backup created on the last Saturday and the corresponding chain of increments.

Hope this helps.
Thanks.

[gdekeijzer]

Ah, this makes indeed good sense. I'll start testing this

[habibalby]

Best answer to get full backup chain copied to disk is to stick to your retention period. What I meant to say, when you reach your day to delete VMS from disk, on the same day when last Veeam job finished, fire your Backup Exec.