Feature Request - Automatic Tape Inventory and Erase

[sowardsj]

In regards to Case # 02381424:
Feature request:

We are a new Veeam Backup and Replication customer. We do both disk and tape backups in our shop. We are moving away from the Veritas Backup Exec product to Veeam Backup and Replication.
You can setup and schedule automatic tape inventory and erase jobs to run as needed with Backup Exec but you can't with Veeam Backup and Replication.

Can these options be added to Veeam Backup and Replication in the next release?

[Dima P.]

Hello sowardsj,

Thanks for sharing your request, we will discuss it with the tape team. Cheers!

[O1982]

I would also like to see a GUI option for this.

I am not sure how this would be accomplished (how does the tape drive notify the OS that a tape is ejected?) but if other backup solutions can do it then so should Veeam.

We should not have to do a powershell script for this.

[veremin]

Hi, Owen,

Can you shed some light on the use case? Why you want to inventory tape device and erase tapes outside of backup window?

Thanks.

[O1982]

Hi v.Eremin,

I am still getting to grips with how Veeam works so maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree here. But this is what I would like to achieve:

Daily Incrementals to Local Disk repository for my Physicals, VMs and a CIFS/SMB share.
Virtual/Synthetic Fulls sent to Daily Tapes (MON, TUE, WED etc).

So I can recover everything from yesterday with one tape (for DR purposes). Due to the size of my infrastructure I can only fit a single copy of everything.

I had an occasion where the newly inserted tape was not recognized as being online and backups to tape did not happen. So that's why I am interested in automatic inventory and as I just need a fresh full copy of everything Automatic erase would also help me...I think!

Thanks,

Owen

[Dima P.]

Hello Owen.

I had an occasion where the newly inserted tape was not recognized as being online and backups to tape did not happen.

Was that a brand new tape media? In case media was previously written by any third part it's not going to be marked as free automatically.

[O1982]

Hi Dima,

No it was a tape that had previously been used by Veeam and was already assigned to a Media Pool. I will double check and test this problem today.

Thanks

Owen

[Dima P.]

Hello Owen,

Thanks, let us know how it goes! In general, you should load new tapes and perform library rescan. Once tapes are in Free media pool other custom media pools can start using these tapes automatically. If media remains in unrecognized media pool you must perform inventory.

[mradke]

Last Post round about three years old.... Is there still a chance for implemantation?

We also coming von BackupExec, so I am used to automate everything

Customer backed up data to tape every mounth, retention time is 12 mounth. that means he had to buy and inventory twelf media now.
Customers company is big, user task are shared. The one whos changing the media isnt the one who administer the veeam installation.
That means media changer had to request a inventory every mounth, or company buy and inventory 12 media now.
Last is good for us, but auto inventory would be yet nice....

[Dima P.]

Hello mradke,

Mind me asking how customer wants to automate the inventory procedure? Run it according to the predefined schedule? Thanks!