Fitting onto tape

[digitlman]

In further planning my Veeam B2D, and then spooling to tape, I forsee a problem getting it all to fit on tape.

My tapes are LTO-4, and fit about 780G to each tape.

With my Exchange backup, I do a full on Friday, and Inc the rest of the week. Veeam puts them all into a single folder on the disk target. I want to keep a at least a month's worth on the drive, which will easily take up more than 1TB of space. Since I am asking Backup Exec to spool everything in that folder to a single tape, it will not fit.

Can I make 2 (or more) separate jobs - one that does the full back ups, and one that does the incremental, and put each into a separate folder?

Thoughts?

[veremin]

It's not possible to process full and increments by different backup jobs. Also, you can't make backup job write to different folders. However, what kind of tape job you're planning to use? Thanks.

[digitlman]

As I said, a single 800G LTO4. I suppose I could have the job span multiple tapes, but that seems messy.

And, due to technical problems, I can only use Backup Exec to dump the raw backup files to tape.

[veremin]

With Veeam tape functionality it's possible to write full and incremental backups to different tape mediums/different media pools; be it backup to tape or file to tape job. I'm not sure about Symantec, but do they have any exclude/include masks using which you can write .vbk and .vib to different tapes? Thanks.

[digitlman]

Yes they do. I suppose I will play with that and see what happens.

However, when I used Backup Exec, I could throw a full backup of the Exchange server to a single tape and store it offsite, and know that I could do a full restore off that single tape.

Now, that doesn't look like it will be the case.

However, in my case, tape is the backup of last resort/disaster recovery. I am doing Veeam backups to the "backups server", which is the primary source for restore. I also have a FreeNAS server, which I use Robocopy to mirror from the primary server once a day. That is the secondary source for restores. Then, there is tape, which as I said, is going to be the last resort, in case of DR, or if a backup gets deleted from the primary (and then from the mirror).

[veremin]

However, when I used Backup Exec, I could throw a full backup of the Exchange server to a single tape and store it offsite, and know that I could do a full restore off that single tape.

You mean that currently produced full backup file is bigger than the one you used with different backup vendor? Thanks.

[digitlman]

With Backup Exec, I always did full Exchange backups. Every day. Yeah, I know .

Each backup was a B2D, and the files were in their own directory. Each full backup was 300G or less and fit onto a single tape fine.

With Veeam, as I said, I have a single job that does Fulls once a week, and Incr the rest of the days, all to a single directory. So far, that dir only has 276G in it. It will fit just fine onto one tape. However, in a couple of weeks, once I have a few fulls and incr files, it might grow more than the 780G.

So, I can either have less B2D retention, or start spanning tapes for my "weekly" full tapes.

[veremin]

Apart from specifying include mask, is it possible with Symantec to copy files that are "not older than X days"? If so, then, you can specify both corresponding mask and rule, and only one (the latest) full backup will be copied to tape mediums. Otherwise, you can create some "staggering" area called "Latest .vbk", for instance and specify it as a source for Symantec tape job. Using PS or bat commands, you will find and copy the latest full backup to it, and, then, execute the tape job.

Either way, you will have one cassette with one weekly full backup on it.

Thanks.

[digitlman]

You can exclude files not accessed in X days....or specific date ranges...but I don't see this working reliably.

I suppose what I could do is the retain the Friday B2D full, rest of the week as Incr...but *not* do an incremental on Sunday. Set up a separate job to do a full backup on Sunday, and then spool that to a "weekly" tape.

[veremin]

Not sure how this scenario would differ from the one that includes usage of VB&R backup job and Symantec tape job with corresponding (.vbk) mask. In both cases, the full backup will be copied to tape on weekly basis. Though, in case of additional backup job, the space in the local repository required for full backup will be doubled.

Thanks.

[digitlman]

As I said, I am not sure the mask will work.

trying it now.

[digitlman]

Preliminary testing shows that the excluding of files after 7 days will probably make things work as I hope.

I will know more after this weekend when the job runs.

Thanks for being a sounding board on this, Vladamir.

[veremin]

Just make sure that the full backup schedule coincides with the "not older than" mask, so that, the newly-created full backup file won't fall out of the specfied "copying" interval. Thanks.