Appending data to already existing on tape

[pob579]

Hi,
I cannot figure out what I am doing wrong…
The goal is:
Add/append NEW data (files/folders) in job’s target folder to the tape containing one full backup.
Then remove tape offsite.
Real life example: Tape with full backup contains 200GB taken offsite.
About 15 GB of data added during business days.
The tape inserted in the drive in one week should contain New data.
NOTE: The data is perfectly compressed. The tape easily may store 2 years of this type of data.

Steps taken:
Dedicated pool with one tape created.
Dedicated job pointing to that pool created.
As I want to run job manually did not check neither FULL, nor Incremental.
Then tried Incremental set for one day (just for having Incremental enabled).
1. When Rotation is set to Do not portect data (cyclically overwrite tapes as required, all exisiting on tape data is wiped out and only New since las Full backup is added.
Why it happens? Does cyclically mean - Remove all before adding new?
I thought it will append New data to existing and will overwrite when the tape will be FULL/
2. When set on Never overwrite data, it asks to insert a new tap, so it kind of PROTECT TAPE forever. This option probably should be in the Protect data for … some period or Forever.

Looks like I am not interpreting wee the Retention options.

Please help to achieve the goal mentioned above.

Thanks.

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Pob,

you assumptions are correct:
1. when "Do not protect data" is set, Veeam will check free space on the tape drive and append by default if it has enough to fit new data, or overwrite otherwise.
2. "...it asks to insert a new tape" means Veeam has detected that tape does not have free space left.
First thing first, please check what capacity is visible in Veeam console for your tapes and what is actual capacity written on those cartridges. Which generation LTO those are?

Thanks!

[pob579]

Egor,
tapes in use are LTO6 only. Latest version of B&R.
There was 2.2GB free on tape when it showed no free space. And I saw this after few different retries.

But suddenly it worked fine...
So after last "no free space", I changed retention to Do not protect Data... and run manually.
It again deleted all previous and backed up only last 2 days (new data).
I saw this effect earlier.
So I started to collect screenshots (tape info and results) for you …
So in order to get no free space with the screenshot showing 2.2 GB free. I put retention back to Never Overwrite.

And this time miracle happened... It added successfully all "missing" data of 1.5 month on local drive folder to existing on tape last 2 days.
After that I decided to remove the tape for simulation of the situation when tape is not in library.

This morning I added it and run the job manually. It perfectly appended yesterdays data.

So I leave it like that with retention on Never Overwrite...
And will check it in a week.

The job is set to incremental one day a week. But in order to eliminate an error (because tape is not in the library)
I just disabled the job.

Tell me please does INCREMENTAL is important in my case. Or I can uncheck it and when I will bring the tape in and run the job manually it will not care of setting FULL or Incremental and just suppose to add new data (that finally is incremental)?

Thanks.

[Egor Yakovlev]

Glad to hear it works.
Incremental backup saves space by copying only changed files. So yeah, it might be of use - If only full backups are selected, we will offload unchanged files alongside, having additional copies of what is already on the tape...