Incremental Backup to Tape

[ahmad313]

Hello Everyone,

I was wondering how to perform an incremental backup to a new tape ?

I have written the latest full backup chain to a set of tapes (5tb to 8 tapes), i don't want to do 8 tapes every month so can i write the latest incremental to a new tape ? Can Veeam somehow read the existing backup chain and write the latest incremental ?

Thanks a lot

[veremin]

What backup mode does a source backup job use? Forever incremental or the one with periodic full backups? In the latter case, what schedule does a full backup have? How media set and overwrite settings look like (media pool)? Thanks.

[ahmad313]

Hello Eremin, Thanks for your reply

The backup mode is the default one : forever incremental.
The media pool settings are defaults ( i think) : [Tapes] Add free tapes automatically, [Media Set] Create new media set for every backup, [Retention] Never overwrite data

Thank you

[veremin]

In this case a corresponding tape job should always copy incremental files, besides the day scheduled for virtual full backup. Thanks.

[ahmad313]

Hi Eremin, you mean that i should create a new tape job "backup copy" and manually select the latest incremental ?

Thank you

[veremin]

I meant that with the specified settings starting from initial cycle a given backup to tape job will copy only increments. So, no need to worry about that.

However, there will be days (based on the mentioned option) when a virtual full backup will be directly synthesized on tapes.

Thanks.

[bzooz1]

This topic may relate to my needs also. Below is my current setup.

Source disk job: M-Th incrementals, Friday full; 23 restore points, because of limited disk space

Monday tape pool: do not create....; do not protect

Separate Backup to Tape jobs for Mon, Tue, Wed, Thur were setup. A separate Friday Full Backtup to Tape job was setup for full backups only. (We previously only had 1 Backup to Tape job (been using it for 1.5 years) but due to the change in tape behavior from v8 to v9 we were forced to changed our plans)

Monday Backup to Tape settings (the Tue, Wed, Thur plans are similar): main disk job is source; media pool for full backups is the Monday pool which contains only the Monday tape; virtual backup schedule set for Last Saturday of Month in January (the source disk job does a full every Friday so I believe this is not used correct?); incremental backups use the Monday tape also; run on Mondays only

When going through the wizard during the setup, it asked whether to copy all chains or only the lastest chain. I chose latest. During the first run of this new Monday plan, it copied the latest chain (latest vbk, and latest vibs). This all seems correct to me. Then on the following Monday, it wanted to copy the latest Friday vbk again. Is this correct? I was hoping that Veeam would only continue to copy the Monday vibs since the previous Fridays vbk was already copied to tape via the Friday Full to Tape plan.

Is there a way to only copy vibs going forward to these daily M-Thur tapes?