Advice on Tape Management

[egroeg]

Dear all.

Just seeking some friendly advice on the best way to manage tape media within Veeam.

We have a Veeam physical server running Windows and local disk repository. Then a Dell TL4000 SAS connected with 4 drives activated and several tapes for rotation.

We wish to have a mixture of monthly and weekly tapes that will only store FULL backups. My query really is what is the best way to organise the media. Would you recommend 1 single media pool and then simply change tapes when rotating? Or an individual media pool for the weeks of the month (like in backupexec terms). Our loader will automatically rotate media, but some weeks our Full may take up 8 tapes, then others it may take 9 or 10. So really interested in recommendations from users with similar setups and what the most appropriate method for media management appears to be.

Thanks

[Dima P.]

Hello George,

If I were you I would configure up to 2 separate media pools (of course if it suits your retention) and point 2 separate backup to tape jobs to these pools. In such case all you drives could write data to tape simultaneously: once jobs starts it locks the media pool and one drive is used.

Additionally, you can automate the media rotation by specifying the retention period for tape media on each of these media pools –so having separate media pools for Weekly and Monthly backups seems to be a good choice.

[veremin]

Also, some information regarding GFS on tape mediums might be found in this topic; worth taking a look. Thanks.