Backup to Tape Performing Unnecessary Extra Full Backup

[Shunx239]

On the next day it is the first time that initial full gets merged with incremental

I was wrong this to be the first time, this is rather long chain going forward incremetal for months.

And two chains suffered the same way in the B&R instance.

Mu guess the reason to be in "Got latest vbk old way"

[JackT]

We have had this issue too. We perform monthly full backups which is meant to start on the first Sunday of every month. Our tape jobs have been taking over 60 hours to finish because of large data sized backups. I've counted 3 over the past week, of 1.4-1.8TB sized jobs, and our incrementals barely ever make it to 1TB. I've found having multiple tapes ready to replace one another really helps, I also opened a support case for it yesterday, to see if there was a more efficient way of doing this. Case no. #05612743 for those interested.

[Shunx239]

The Veeam support argues for "the virtual full backup must be always newer than the full backup on the disk. Otherwise, the tape job will copy not only the full backup from the disk, but also the whole chain of incremental backups" reported in https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110.

That sounds new for me and does not match our use case.

We have forever forward incremental backup chain with 12 days on disk and full backup to tape scheduled monthly. We have previous virtual full backups on tape of 15.06 and 20.07 following a chain of daily incremental backups on the tape without any attempt to copy the whole backup chain again.
It happend only with the August backup when the virtual full on tape became older than the merged full on the disk.

So suddenly it started to copy unnecessary backups to the tape because unable to follow the existing chain. The major impact for the tape scheduling are unnecessary fulls, but it is amazing to see the same incrementals to be copied two times.

I consider the behaviour, claimed to be by design, to be wrong but even worse if it is not normally enforced and gets triggered by unknown factors.

[Shunx239]

Well, they proved that to have happened before as well.

This design choice however is annoying and reduces the value one can get from the tape backup.

I believe this logic to be introduced based on the limited use case scenario.

With a wider insight it could be at least made an option.