Best practice daily with Tape job Monthly

[GianlucaCroci]

Good Morning,
a year ago we implemented an S3 object storage, and we're slowly increasing the Retention to get to have the longest possible period by fully exploiting the storage.
The problem, for which I write here in the Forum, is that at the end of each month we put a FULL of the VMs or Physical Servers on Tape.
These end-of-month jobs to put the saves on Tapes take the saves from the S3 storage that's in the same location as the Tape Library.
To try to reduce this procedure as much as possible, we perform a FULL on S3 every week, so as not to have a chain that is too long and significantly lengthen the save on Tape.

1. what are the best practices for this type of use?
2. how can we've a full every month, which we then put on Tape, and the other days of the month of the incrementals?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Regards
Gianluca

[david.domask]

Hi Gianluca,

There aren't too many practical differences in execution for Backup to Tape regardless of where your backups reside. (i.e., block based vs object storage repositories) Ensure there's a stable connection between proxy and the object storage, and the rest will have no discernible difference for your Backup to Tape strategy.

> how can we've a full every month, which we then put on Tape, and the other days of the month of the incrementals?

Two ideal ways to do this:

1. Normal Backup to Tape job and configure a monthly Virtual Full. This would require the primary (source) job targeting the Object Storage repository is Forever Forward Incremental (no periodic fulls)

2. Tape GFS job with Monthly and Daily media pool configured. Configure a desired monthly day, and on that day a full backup will be placed in the Monthly Media Set. The Daily will have incremental backups, but periodically will require a Full backup be stored in the Daily Media Set. Retention mode for the source job does not matter with Tape GFS

I would not worry about the source chain too much, Backup to Tape (and Tape GFS) are fairly smart in how it handles the source backups to copy to tape and will ensure you can meet your tape-out goals. I'm guessing you maybe remember older versions of the tape integration which were much more reliant on how the source job(s) were configured, but many of those old requirements are no longer essential, Veeam Tape jobs will be able to match your tape-out + backup strategy.