Full tape backup, restore needs previous tapes.

[MBMSG2020]

Hello there,

I am new to Veeam Backup, and i am running into something weird.

We run a daily full backup to tape. nothing fancy, 3 machines, 400 gb. We use a weekly and monthly tape rotating schema, so we have all weekdays, and then fridays are numbers 1trough 5.

Everything fits on 1 tape. I was under the impression, that when i run a full backup, everything gets backuped as "new". So, no files left behind which did not change or anything, like in incremental.

However, when i try to do a restore, and i pick the friday from last week for example, i add some files and folders to restore, it tells me i need tapes from previous weeks? How is this possible? Everything is on the last tape, i picked the last session, so why would it need tapes from previous weeks. I also depends on which files i choose. Sometimes it doesnt need previous weeks, while with other files it does.

Anyone known wat could be causing this?

Thanks in advance.

[Dima P.]

Hello Martijn,

Can you please clarify if that's a file to tape or backup to tape job? Additionally what Veeam B&R you are running? Cheers!

[MBMSG2020]

Hello,

It is a file to tape job. The version we run is 9.5 Update 4 (9.5.4.2866)

On the edit screen of the job, we only selct Full backup with a set time to run on. Incremental backup is not selected to run at a certain time. On the history screen, all is green.

When i do a restore i click on restore files, add some random selection of files.
At first it will always show the most recent one, with the start time of that particular object.

As you can see in the image, This is from the backup of yesterday. It started right before midnight, 3 sessions.



When i click next, it checks for the tapes.

As you can see, it asks for a tape of Vrijdag1. This tape was last used on friday october 23.
Woensdag is the tape from yesterday evening.



I dont understand why. It also does not matter if i remove one of the selected directories from the restore. For every session, it needs those 2 tapes.

[Dima P.]

Thanks! Any chance the tape Vrijdag1 from Friday October 23 keeps the full backup or not?

[MBMSG2020]

Every tape keeps the full backup. We do not make incremental backups on tape.

On the log and the backup description it shows "Active Full" backup every day.

When I edit the settings, you get the tabs, Name, Files and folders, Full Backup, Incremental Backup.... We only select the Full backup option, to run every night. The incremental backup is not run automatically.

[Dima P.]

Thanks for the update Martijn! One more question - how media set creation option is set on the target media pool? Cheers!

[MBMSG2020]

On the Edit media Pool settings we have

Media Set: Do not create, always continue using current media set.
Retention: Do not protect data(cyclically overwrite tapes as required)
Options: Nothing selected

These are our tapes.

[Dima P.]

Any chance that these tapes were written before the 9.5U4 was installed? In previous versions it was required to load all the tapes till the very first full backup to restore the folder history for the given date, but we fixed this behavior in 9.5U4 for all newly created file to tape backups. Thanks!

[MBMSG2020]

This is perfectly possible these. These tapes were used for at least 1 year already.

I will clear them all, and make a new backup set and reassign them. I installed version 10 now, see if that helps.

I will let you know if it works better now.

[Dima P.]

Martijn,

Understood. Let us know how it goes with new tapes then, cheers!