Daily Windows Agent Backup to Tape

[Trapeze]

Hello everyone. Fairly new to Veeam and the forum in general, and somewhat of an IT newbie.

We're currently reworking our backup structure and I've made great progress so far.
As it currently stands we do daily reverse incremental backups of all our Servers. Those backups are then copied to a Tape (and also duplicated to another backup drive).

There is one Problem however:
One of our backups is a "Windows Agent Backup" "Failover Cluster" type Backup, which has no option for reverse incremental. As I understand it can only do forever forward incremental.

"Name: [Redacted]
Description: Physical Hyper V Cluster
Type: failover cluster
Mode: managed by backup server
Protected computers:
[Redacted]
Backup mode: entire computer
Destination: Veeam backup repository
Target storage: [Redacted]
Retention policy: 7 days
Application-aware processing is enabled
Backup is scheduled to run automatically
GFS retention policy: not set"


With all our other Backup Jobs we work with Reverse Incremental because we do daily full backups to tape. Every day the Tape job checks for a full backup file and copies it over. The Reverse-Incremental Method makes sure we only have to store one full backup and several increments, and that the sole full backup file is the most up-to-date one (since it is reverse).

This works well for all our backup jobs EXCEPT the Windows Agent one. It would have to create a full backup every day in order for the Tape Job to have something to copy, which is not feasible or economical as each file would be around 180GB for each day of the week.
Our current setting only creates a synthetic full backup on Sundays, creating the problem that only the Monday tape has the full backup while each other day copies nothing over.

Is there any way to make Veeam transfer over an up-to-date full backup to the tape every day without us having to create & store a full backup for each day?

[david.domask]

Hi Trapeze, welcome to the forums.

If the job is using Forever Forward Incremental retention mode (i.e., no full backups are scheduled), you can utilize the Backup to Tape Virtual Fulls to produce full backups.

Virtual Fulls create Synthetic Full backups "on the fly" directly on tape, so no need for additional repository space to host a full backup. Virtual Fulls will only be created for source jobs which use the Forever Forward Incremental Mode, so you can mix and match the jobs using Reverse Incremental and Forever Forward Incremental (and naturally Forward Incremental) retention mode in the same Backup to Tape job.

[Trapeze]

Hello david, thank you very much for the welcome and your reply!

I'm not seeing an explicit option to create a "Virtual Full" within the Tape Job and I didn't see anything about it in your links either, perhaps I missed it.
Can you instruct me on where to find it or how to set it up?

Perhaps it's worth noting that we only have 1 Tape Job that processes all our Backup Jobs onto the Tape, as opposed to separate Tape Jobs.

Also, as a correction; I am actually not entirely sure if the Failover Cluster Backup is a "Forever Forward Incremental" or "Forward Incremental", I can rule out it being a "Reverse Incremental" though. I does not explicitly tell me anywhere, but I can tell from the files that the Full Backup File isn't always the latest one, like with the other jobs. Does this make a difference in this case?

Also; we currently have the Failover Cluster Backup Job set to create a Synthetic Full Backup on Sundays. Personally I don't really know if there is a point to that (I didn't do the initial setup of these Jobs) and if this interfers with the creation of Virtual Fulls during the Tape Job.

[david.domask]

Hi Trapeze,

You're very welcome for the response!

And sure, I suspect that maybe it was missed on the page as it's not so clear, but if you check the screenshot in the first link I sent (this one), clicking the Schedule button reveals the Virtual Full Schedule window as you can see on the bottom of the page. That is what I'm referring to.

For your job retention mode, the difference between Forever Forward Incremental and Forward Incremental is that Forward Incremental performs periodic full backups, either Synthetic Fulls or Active Fulls. The retention modes are described here in more detail, but if you are having Synthetic Fulls being created periodically, that means it's Forward Incremental.

So that being said, this does change the answer a bit as Virtual Fulls are only used for Backup to Tape jobs for Forever Forward Incremental source jobs. If you don't have a need or desire for the periodic Synthetic Fulls, you can safely disable them and then set the tape job to do a Virtual Full every day.

If you require periodic fulls on the source job, then you can consider the following:

1. If your repository supports Fast Clone, you can schedule a Synthetic Full each day and have a "space-less" full backup on the source job. This will not increase the required disk space for the primary job as Fast Clone will reuse existing blocks from previous backups in the chain, but the backup will be a full backup for all intents and purposes.

1a. The same can be done without Fast Clone capable repositories of course, but this will mean more space needed for the Full backups