Adding tape capacity by adding a second tape drive?

[Pegasus05]

Hello everybody,

I got a client with a small backup solution (~1.5TB, ~25 VMs, ~8 B2D jobs doing synthetic fulls every night, one SureBackup job, one D2T job, one external LTO-5 standalone drive) where "everything has to fit on a single tape in one night"-scenario. This works well, until the tape (LTO-5, ~1.3 TB) runs full and gets ejected in the middle of the night. The tape job waits for the next tape and eventually runs out of time, backup-to-tape incompleted. There's no mechanical changer. Tapes get switched on the next day by an employee.

So the idea would be to expand tape capacity by adding another external tape drive to the same job. This way everything would fit on the loaded tape(s) without changing.

Question is: does B&R v8 support two or more drives in the same job and splits the data across those drives/tapes? Does this even work if there's a tape server involved?

I've not the liberty to try and test without disrupting the backup system in place right now. So any advice is much appreciated.

Regards,
Alex

[Dima P.]

Hello Alex,
No there is no such functionality is the existing version of the Veeam Backup and Replication. To clarify the request – would you like to write the data successively (which means tapes are used one after another one) or simultaneously (two tapes at the same time) even if it can cause a tape media overrun? Thanks.

[Pegasus05]

Hello Dima,

Thanks for the answer. I feared that this wouldn't work.

Writing data successively to a group of drives (with prioritization) would absolutely suffice. My aim is to extend the total capacity on tape(s).

So I think I would have to create a second B2T-job and move some of the connected B2D-jobs over there specifically.

[Dima P.]

I think I would have to create a second B2T-job and move some of the connected B2D-jobs over there specifically.

That might do the trick. Do forget that in order to run these B2T simultaneously you need to target them to the separate media pools.

[Pegasus05]

Looks like another approach would be to wait for "Global Media Pool" in B&R v9.