Full backup to tape once a month

[DusanM]

Hi everyone.

I have a simple task and I have hard time to accomplish that.

We have a file server, around 4TB in size. I want to back it up once a month, full backup, to a tape.

In January I started backing up just files from the file server and it worked fine for 5-6 months until Veeam database got full and I could not do any other backups. So I had to fix the database to continue with backups.
Veeam tech support told me that the database got full because of the indexes created from tape backup. They recommended backing up the entire VM.

Now, my problem is this: how do I create a backup job so full backup is done once a month without any incremental?
For example, last night I run a full backup to the tape from a backup, and it finished successfully. This morning I wanted to restore a file, and Veeam asks me for tape 007 although I did full backup to the tape 009.

So, how do I do full VM backup once a month to a tape so I does not depend on the other tapes?

[Dima P.]

Hello Dusan,

In file to tape job settings uncheck the box Run incremental backup automatically. This will instruct the job to perform only full backup to tape. Cheers!

[DusanM]

Thank you for a quick reply Dima.

You are referring to "File to Tape" backup job. When I used that job I had issue with the database as I described in my post.
Now I am using "Backup to Tape" as I could not find another way to backup the entire VM. And with that, I do not have that box "Run incremental backup automatically".

[veremin]

Can you tell us how backup to tape job and media pool it's pointed to are configured? Also, can you double check last night's tape backup session and see how many restore points were copied to tapes and how many tapes were used? Thanks!

[DusanM]

Thank you veremin for your reply.

I am going through the job settings. Below are some of the settings.
I just saw a checkbox “Process latest full backup chain only.”. I am going to check that box and try again.

About the info that you asked for:
From the job properties:
It uses its own media pool.
Tapes: 13
Free space: 32TB
Media set: Do not create, always continue using current media set
Retention: Never overwrite data
Parallel processing: Disabled
Export to vault: Do not export
WORM: False

Incremental backup: Archive incremental backups to tape: unchecked



This is from the job statistics:

Code: Select all

23/10/2019 3:05:40 PM :: Job started at 2019-10-23 3:05:33 PM  
23/10/2019 3:05:40 PM :: Processing tasks  
23/10/2019 3:06:54 PM :: Processing full backup of FM FileStorage Backup New  
24/10/2019 1:53:42 AM :: 0 folders and 1 files backed up  
24/10/2019 1:53:43 AM :: Ejecting tapes used by backup  
24/10/2019 1:53:43 AM :: Ejecting tape B00009 from Drive 1 (Server: charleston.fmrp.com, Library: FMTapeDriveLTO7 (Tape0), Drive ID: Tape0)  
24/10/2019 1:53:44 AM :: Tape 'B00009' ejected successfully  
24/10/2019 1:53:45 AM :: Load: Source 94% > Proxy 18% > Network 35% > Target 58%  
24/10/2019 1:53:45 AM :: Primary bottleneck: Source  
24/10/2019 1:53:45 AM :: Job finished at 2019-10-24 1:53:45 AM  

So, from here I can see that only one tape has been used. I cannot see how many restore points. My goal was to get only one restore point and that would be the lastest full backup.

I will update you again after the job is done.

[DusanM]

Ok, I ran my backup to tape last night. Job finished successfully.

So my job was to backup the entire VM (file server) from the latest full backup to a tape.

Now, I tried to restore a single file from that tape, and it does not let me, I can either restore the entire VM or nothing. Is this expected behavior?

[DusanM]

Ok, this is what I need to do if I want to restore a file from tape backup. I need to restore the entire VM from tape to a disk, and than restore a file from disk. This might take me a day or longer to do, but this is the best I came up with.

If anybody has a better idea, please let me know.

[veremin]

Is this expected behavior?

Correct, if you're using backup to tape job, you will need to restore VM or VM backup to repository first to get access to guest file. Thanks!

[DusanM]

Thank you Veremin. Tested it and it works. Very slow process though.

[dadi01]

Can you tell us how backup to tape job and media pool it's pointed to are configured? Also, can you double check last night's tape backup session and see how many restore points were copied to tapes and how many tapes were used? Thanks!

interested