Archive to Tape procedure

[dannyt65]

Hi All,

On our trial of veam we backup our servers daily with incremental changes then full synthetic once a week and with a retention of 31 days on disk. I believe I could replicate this to another target e.g. a tape drive and then at the end of the month remove the tapes and mark for the appropriate month, or I could schedule a monthly full active job to go to tape?

I am new to veeam, we currently use backup exec, and every month a scheduled full backup runs and then duplicates to tape for archived storage.

I believe I could run a system in veeam but I am wondering how everyone else would run this?

Thanks in advance

[veremin]

I believe I could replicate this to another target e.g. a tape drive and then at the end of the month remove the tapes and mark for the appropriate month, or I could schedule a monthly full active job to go to tape?

Actually, with Veeam both scenarios (copy monthly worth chain, copy only the latest full backup) are possible. So, it's up to you to decide which approach you want to stick to. Thanks.

[dannyt65]

Thanks for this, what would be the best way to automate copying the monthly chain to tape?

Thanks
Daniel

[veremin]

Create either backup or file to tape job, choose a backup job (or backup job's folder, accordingly) as a source and set a monthly schedule for it.

For how long should data stay on tapes?

Thanks.

[dannyt65]

we would keep each entire month including incrementals on tape and then remove and store in fire safe for 10 years!

Thanks

[veremin]

In this case, you may want to do the following:

1) Set a monthly schedule for a tape job.
2) Select "create new media set for every backup session" option for a media pool.
3) Select "Never overwrite data" option for a media pool.
4) Enable "Move all offline tapes from this media pool into the following media vault"
5) Add a new vault called "fire safe" or however you like.

Thanks.

[DaveWatkins]

Random aside, but worth mentioning since a lot of people are unaware.

A fire safe typically won't protect tapes if there is a fire. Fire safes are designed to protect paper from self combusting. The temperature paper does that is significantly above the temperature a tape will melt so it's entirely possible your tapes will be destroyed in a fire without any paper in that safe being harmed (other than by melted tapes)

Check the specs of your safe, or store tapes offsite