Differential option?

[B.F.]

Good morning,

It's not obvious to me how one can do a differential file backup to tape with Veeam.

Suggestions?

Thanks!

[Shestakov]

Hello B.F.
Do you mean File-to-tape backup? If yes, please check the link.
Thanks!

[B.F.]

Thanks for the quick reply.

Quoting from the link provided:

"You can create both full and incremental backups of files on tape."

I'm not finding anything about a differential (not resetting the archive bit until a full backup is done)

[Shestakov]

Got it. Veeam doesn`t perform differential backups.
Isn`t incremental backup sufficient? Could you provide your use case, please? Thanks!

[B.F.]

Hmmm, the more I think about it perhaps you are right that it might not be needed.

The point for us using differential file backup was 3-fold

• 1. Always have the latest changed guest OS file on the newest tape.
  
  2. Backup to tape is quicker and less space intensive than a full but would take a little longer than an Incremental. (At present our full file backup uses 2 LTO-5 tapes apposed to a Differential which only needs 1. Latest Full and latest Differential always are offsite)
  
  3. If a complete restore is required, only would need 2 tapes. (Latest Full and the last Differential opposed to an Incremental which would need the whole chain of tapes. This may be moot if we have a .vbk on tape)

Having a vbk of the file server to the latest tape would might work. I'm assuming we would need more tapes since the capacity of 1 tape would be exceeded. Can Veeam handle larger than tape .vbk spill over?

I'm very open to suggestions on an alternative way to somehow combine a guest OS file backup of our file server as well as a complete VM backup. We do also replicate the File Server to an alternate site daily with 2 restore points.

Thanks for the help!

[Shestakov]

Can Veeam handle larger than tape .vbk spill over?

Yes, if the tapes are in the same media pool.

Regarding the strategy, it really depends on your needs, capabilities and policies. Our best practices are described here.
As far as I understood your backup plan is D2T(disk to tape). If you`d like to stay on it, I would suggest to use basic backup job using forever incremental backup method and backup to tape job for a historical backups. Restore from disk backups is faster and more flexible, leveraging Veeam Explorers for file- and item-level restore.

However, as I said I don`t know much about your capabilities and wishes. Thanks.