Help with backup to tape?

[mickllf]

I have recently bought Veeam backup & replication Enterprise to replace Backup Exec. However I'm having a nightmare getting our backups onto tape.

I have 6 backup jobs that run each night, one after the other and then a single tape job that should start when all the previous have finished.

Active full backup each Friday
Incremental Monday to Thursday otherwise.

These are forward incremental without synthetic fulls. My full backup contains about 7.5TB of data but the incrementals would only be about 500gb a night. I have set these to only have 2 restore points for the time being until I get the tape element working correctly.

I have created two media pools,
Friday - Contains LTO6 tapes that I have set in the tape job as the media pool for full backups.
Mon-Thur - Contains LTO5 tapes that are set as the media pool for incremental backups.

I put the 4 LTO6 tapes into our changer and first ran this job on Friday. It created a full backup of each VM and then started the tape job using the LTO6 tapes as it should. So far so good. However on Monday I put the Monday LTO5 tape into the device and left the job to run. The incrementals were created but when the tape job started, it attempted to copy the full backup to the Friday media pool. Completely ignoring the Mon-Thurs pool which wouldn't have been able to store a full backup on anyway.

I've read various threads etc and tried various things but I'm now two weeks in without being able to resolve this myself. Any help appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[Dima P.]

Hello Michael,
Can you please clarify what media set creation settings for both media pools are and how retention is configured? Thanks

[mickllf]

Each backup job has 2 restore points set until I get the tape backup working. I want the full backups that run each friday to backup to the LTO6 media pool and the incremental backups that run Mon-Thurs to backup to the LTO5 pool.

Friday pool - Do not create set, continue using current. Retention is protect for 27 days
Mon-Thur pool - Do not create set, continue using current. Retention is protect for 6 days

[Dima P.]

Got it, thanks! Just to be sure – Veeam Backup and Replication is up to date with Update2, right?

[mickllf]

It wasn't but I have since upgraded to 2B and the issue remains.

[mickllf]

Tried to rerun the tape job again today and each time it tries to backup the full .vbk files using the friday lto6 media pool.

[Dima P.]

Thanks, so even if it supposed to be an incremental job run the full backup is transferred to the full backup media pool right? Can you open a file catalogue in VBR and make sure that the said full backup has already been written to tape? Also you can check it in the tape media properties.

[mickllf]

The 6 full backup jobs ran on Friday night. Once they finished the tape job kicked in. This was successful. In the log I can see that it put all full backups onto the LTO6 pool as instructed. It then pulled in a tape from the LTO5 pool and processed the incrementals (none of which existed at this point).

It appears that this is what is trying to do each evening. Run the full and then the incremental. But as Friday is the only evening where we have the LTO6 tapes in the drive it just sits there waiting for tapes.

All I want it to do is the full on friday and the incremental's Mon-Thur.... Is there anyway of getting this done?

[Dima P.]

Michael,
I have to ask you to open a support case since the behavior you described does not look like expected. Please post the case ID to this thread so I could forward it to our QA team. Thanks!

[mickllf]

Just started one. Case 00953253