Backup to Tape always FULL

[jbrullemans]

Hi,

Because of the increase of ransomware around the world the only way to have a complete offline backup is in mine opion still a tape solution. Backup to the cloud can still be compromised if credentails are cracked.
Currently our backup jobs are forward incremental with active full on saturday.
So what i would to achieve is that on working days a the full backup chain (or virtual full) is backupped to the tape streamer. So on monday it is the Full of sa with incrementals of su-mo. on tuesday it is : full of saturday and incrementals of su-mo-tu etc. etc.

Does anyone know how to configure this? i tried virtual full on every day but that doesn't seem to work. I don't want to backup only the incremenals because in case of a disaster this could result in using 6 tapes to restore.

The physical setup for this will be : local server with 12 or more hd spindels with local attached VTL LTO7.

[veremin]

i tried virtual full on every day but that doesn't seem to work

What specific issues you encountered with daily virtual full backup? What backup mode does a source backup job use?

[jbrullemans]

Hi,
The problem with daily virtual full is that is doesn't do a daily full it just writes the incremental to tape.
The source backup mode is forward incremental with active full on saturday.

[veremin]

Try to switch:

1) Either to reversed incremental mode
2) Or to forward forever incremental and daily virtual full backup

This way, the .vbk file will be copied or created on tapes on everyday basis.

Thanks.

[jbrullemans]

Hi Eremin,

That is exactly what i don't want. Revesere incremental is to slow.
but forward forever you mean? don't do active or synthetic full and use virtual full for tape? Aint there another way? forever incremental is a little bit scary i think beause the you never reset the backup chain.
John

[veremin]

don't do active or synthetic full and use virtual full for tape?

Correct.

Aint there another way?

I doubt that you will manage to copy full backup daily with any other approach.

forever incremental is a little bit scary i think beause the you never reset the backup chain.

With periodic SureBackup and health checks, you should be OK.

Thanks.

[lyapkost]

Aint there another way?

Hi John. If a source job is forward incremental with periodic fulls enabled the tape job won't write synthetic fulls. That's by design (see note).

As a trick you may try to use in the tape job a pre-job powershell script which disables synthetic fulls in the source job and a post-job script which enables them again.

[hwelvaar]

Where or how can I submit a feature request ?

As described above, backup to tape (offline storage) is the only way to be 100% sure that hackers won't be able to destroy or encrypt all your data.

I too need a full backup to tape every single day, but still want to use incremental backup for the preceeding backup-to-disk job.

Yes I know reverse incremental exists, but it is slow, and available only for VM's. I also use Veeam agent for a number of physical servers, and reverse incremental is not available for agent based backups.

I mean how stupid is it, that if you do periodic active or synthetic full to disk, as a result you cannot do virtual full to tape. ????

[veremin]

Where or how can I submit a feature request ?

You've already done it by posting here.

I mean how stupid is it, that if you do periodic active or synthetic full to disk, as a result you cannot do virtual full to tape. ????

It's not, if you think about the idea or the use case behind tape virtual full backup. The idea is simple - to allow users to back up forward forever incremental chains.

Thanks.

[wolfgang]

Hi together,
I'm facing the same problem.
I want to do daily full backups to tape and I also have virtual and physical backups(via agent).

Now after a few mails with the support it seems there is maybe a solution for this (for me also stupid) problem.
I need to do active fulls once a month because my company told me to do that.
Reverse increments are not available for physical backups so there is no option to only backup ONE restore point to tape (daily).

More funny that if you run a active full manually via the GUI the virtual full is created by the tape-job as described in this article:
If the source backup chain contains a full backup that was created on the virtual full day (for example, an active full backup created manually), the tape job will copy it and will not create a virtual full.
Source: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... tml?ver=95

The support told me, that on the next tape-backup the active full will be used as basis for the next virtual full.

I can understand that it makes sense for forever incremental chains. But a simple additional checkbox in the tape backup "do a virtual full, even if an active/synthetic full is scheduled" would resolve the problem.
Because technically it doesn't seem to be a problem if a manually executed backup does not stop the tape-backup-job from creating a virtual fulls.

Now my Idea how to workaround that:
Create forever incremental chain without any planned fulls.
Create a windows task which calls Veeam via API/Powershell to create a manual active full (or synthetic) monthly.
I need to try this, but for my understanding it is exactly what I and (I'm sure many) other customers want.

Active fulls + daily full backup to tape.
I will try this out and give a update here, maybe this helps others.

Regards
Wolfgang

[jvlad]

Hey wolfgang....
Still waiting for that update you said you will post.

[wolfgang]

Hi,
sorry I forgot about this thread as I had other stuff todo .
Yes, this procedure works, It only copies one restore-point to tape.

Regards
Wolfgang

[Evi]

Hi,
Sorry to come back with this old thread but I m facing exactly the same difficulties described here. I've been looking around the forum but cannot find solution.

I'm working with daily incrementals and Active full weekly. Until now I was using File to Tape to copy all files daily on tapes (usualy 2 full VBK + x VIB according to my retention). But size have slowly became too big and I want to copy only the latest chain on tape daily.

That's where I've tried the "backup to tape" option, but it now copy only the incrementals on tape. I cannot turn on reverse incrementals for these jobs.

Is there any now solution to achieve this basic functionnality or not yet : Having everyday both my FULL and all incrementals of my last CHAIN copied on tape ?

Thank you for your help.
Evi.

[Dima P.]

Hello Evi,

To clarify: you need to keep full backup plus incremenal backup on a single tape or it's ok to keep backup chain within several tapes? If last option works, you can set one week retention for tapes in the media pool and such tapes will be overwritten at the end of every week. The next tape job run will backup the entire backup chain again starting from the full backup (and you can select to process only latest backup chain in the backup to tape job properties). Cheers!

[Evi]

Hello Dima,

The goal would be to keep full backup plus incremenal backup on a single tape/job, like we did in the past with "file to tape", but now with "backup to tape" in order to have only the last chain on the band. Seems there is no much option to achieve this. I will have a talk with my local veeam support next week if possible.

Thank you for your answer.
regards,

[dcolpitts]

I too am stuck with this dilemma with a requirement of a daily full on tape and don't really see a proper solution for it yet. In our case we do forward incremental with synthetic fulls on Fridays to a StoreOnce 3540 Catalyst store, and with a secondary target to a stand alone LTO7 tape drive (no autoloader / library, just a single cartridge that is manually changed daily). In the event we need to do a full system restore from the tape, we don't want the hassle of tracking down tapes - we just want to insert the last known good tape and do a full restore to the tape the tape was created.

Personally, I'm not confident I could do a full restore from tape right now utilizing Veeam if need ever arised. Atleast with BackupExec (when we utilized it), I knew where I stood with what is actually on the tapes.

dcc

[soncscy]

Hey Dean,

I think it's just a limitation of doing the forward incremental backups and targeting a storeonce. You're definitely doing good by the Storeonce limitations, but this is at odds with increments and tape backups.

Why not just simplify it? Separate Full + Incremental media pools, full is new mediaset each time, increments append to the previous tape and makes a new mediaset before your tape job runs (when it pulls the full backup from the source job).

Granted, it's an extra tape, but it's

1. Predictable
2. Simple
3. (relatively) Fast as far as tape can be

Wouldn't this work?

I've not battled with BackupExec for years, but I cannot imagine that somehow it's something you pull from regularly. In every tape setup I've seen with clients, DR tests always were measured in days for even moderately sized VMs (TiB in size or tens of TiB), and we built restore strategies around this.

Maybe BackupExec is doing it differently and is able to get volumes or files back to live faster, but for full VMs, we built time into the DR strat after testing in order to ensure we had a hard-written and established benchmark for when a DR scenario is off the rails. It saved tons of arguments and set clear expectations early on.

[dcolpitts]

Soncscy - as an FYI the last time I did a major restore from tape using BackupExec (16.x) was probably two years ago and it was to restore an Exchange server. I think it was LTO 5 tape with a HPE StoreEver Ultrium 3000 connected via a SmartArray P212 on a DL380 Gen8 running Windows 2012R2 and restoring over 1GbE to the ESXi host. I think at the time the mailbox database was about 350GB and it took a couple of hours (the customer didn't have a StoreOnce or anything else - it was tape only). That particular customer received a major IT overhaul last summer and now has a StoreOnce 3640 with 365 daily restore points, utilizing Catalyst, a Nimble AF20Q with 2 hour storage snapshots (36 total snapshots per volume) and a pair of USB RDX drives (4TB cartridges) that run active fulls every single night as soon as the Catalyst job is done and they go offsite daily (oh - and BE waved bye-bye and it's all Veeam now). And the media server + ESXi cluster hosts + StoreOnce area all teamed 10GbE interfaces (so 20GbE throughput). Of course, that has nothing to do with this though...

In this case, the customer is specifically asking for a full on tape every day. They have a pair of LTO7 drives (both non-library in a 1U chassis) - one for their normal VMs, and one specifically for a virtual security DVR that archives all the security cameras from around the campus. There's been a couple of incidents on campus where police have come looking for camera footage after the fact and the customer would like to just hand them the tape (yeah - I know it's not going to be that easy). And the customer wants to take the previous day's cartridges offsite daily. Right now we have a left media pool (for the VMs) and a right media pool (for the DVR VM).

dcc

[soncscy]

Well, forgive me then, but if it's video files, why use the VM backups? Shouldn't File to Tape do exactly what you want? I know 9.5u4 had some bizarre thing with file to tape restores (a few clients hit it), but this seems like what they really want. Just make full backups and call it a day -- does the daily output of the DVR fit on an LTO7?

[dcolpitts]

The DVR's file system isn't accessible from the Veeam server. And yes - the DVR does fit.