Estimating DB size/RAM usage

[ithelp345]

We have a lot of tape jobs that backup a lot of small files. The tape catalog on our SQL server is currently 210GB. Does this mean that Veeam will always try to load up the entire DB into RAM? The server currently uses 95% of my RAM which isn't too much of a problem except I cannot view the contents of the tape as Veeam says that it times out when trying to load the contents.

[Gostev]

Does this mean that Veeam will always try to load up the entire DB into RAM?

Actually this is completely up to the SQL Server. Veeam has absolutely no control over how SQL Server chooses to handle the data stored in a particular database... we're just issuing SQL queries and getting results, as any other SQL client would.

We have a lot of tape jobs that backup a lot of small files.

I don't know if you noticed the corresponding note in our user interface, but File to Tape jobs were simply designed to handle such scenarios. This functionality is a by-product of Backup to Tape jobs, which were built to copy fewer of larger files (image-level backups) to tape. We then implemented File to Tape jobs on top of the same engine, and recognizing they do not scale too well we made it a feature of our free edition for small environments to use. And of course all paid editions received this feature too as a result, but it does not consume a license there either.

We're actually completely rebuilding this functionality for V12. This will bring proper File to Tape backup engine with the initial scalability goal of 1 billion files.