Discussions related to exporting backups to tape and backing up directly to tape.
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dasfliege
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Full Name: Florin
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FEATURE REQUEST: Always copy latest chain only

Post by dasfliege »

Hi Guys

Based on many many questions and problems about veeam GFS-to-Tape functionality, i asume that i'm not the only one that is completely unhappy with the current implementation in Veeam B&R v9.
I'm working at a problem with veeam support atm, that one of our tape-jobs tries to compensate failed jobs in the past and copies just a huge amount of data to tape. (case ID: 01915317).
Every other Backup-Product i know, just copies the latest available backupset to tape. No mather if the last run was successfull or not. A successfull backup is essential for almost every company and therefore everybody has to make sure that they have appropriate mechanisms to monitor if their backups were successfull or not. I don't know anybody that wants a "robot" (in this case veeam) to compensate failed runs by doing just anything weird.

Therefore i request a feature which allows you to tell veeam to ALWAYS only copy the latest FULL backup to tape. Here are a few reasons:
- A classic tapelibrary does not have unlimited space for tapes. Everybody who uses tapes wants to calculate how many tapes are needed for the next run. If it only copies the latest FULL backup, i can exactly determine the amount of tapes i need to insert.
- I have to guarantee to our customers, that they have a consistent backup on tape at least once a month. I want to know exactly what data is on which tapes.
- If a backup failed for whichever reason (maybe a hardware error with the tapedrive), i want to rerun this backup completely. In this case i erase all the tapes that have already been written and start the job from scratch. This way i can guarantee that all the needed data is written to tape and that it didn't used more tapes then necessary.
- If no new restorepoint has been created for a source-job since the last run of the tapejob, i still want veeam to write the newest restorepoint to tape. I don't want it to wait for a new point and i don't want it to just ignore this source. If i have to do a restore, i need all the data on one set of tapes. It's not the job of veeam to make sure that my source-jobs are running correctly. If there is a problem with a source-job, i have to fix that and run the backup-job afterwards. In every other case, it is a intended behavior that there is no new data and veeam should just proceed with writing the available stuff to tape.
- Another nice feature would be to choose the time for starting the tape-job myself. "00:00" probably isn't an ideal time for many customers. There is absolutely no reason, why the start-time can't be chosen by ourselfs.

Thanks in advance for considering this.
Regards
Florin
Dima P.
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Re: FEATURE REQUEST: Always copy latest chain only

Post by Dima P. »

Hi Florin,
Thank you for your post and sorry for the delay in responding.

GFS media pool is designed as an archiving target with a thought that you have a scope of source backup jobs scheduled differently. That is the reason we have an advanced waiting logic and no exact start time for the job (basically GFS job is running for the whole scheduled day and awaits for new restore points)
Therefore i request a feature which allows you to tell veeam to ALWAYS only copy the latest FULL backup to tape.
This option is available only for simple backup to tape jobs (pointed to simple media pool). GFS job takes the full backup for the set date or waits for this restore point to be created during the scheduled day. If no luck, it goes back in time to find the proper replacement with a thought that this restore point was not archived by this GFS job before. This restore point could be a previous full backup or an incremental restore point, but in this case synthesized full backup is going to be created.

May I ask, have you tried using the simple backup to tape job instead?
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