Incremental Files to Tape usage and retention

[TaylorB]

I'm trying to understand how Full vs Incremental work on Files to Tape jobs.

I have a 30TB Files to tape job (All large SQL backup files, so not that many files, just large size). If I do a weekly full, is it going to write all 30TB to tape every weekend? It seems like it would, but given the change rate, that is lot of tapes and lot of duplicate files.

The only other scheduling option is monthly. If I did monthly and then daily incrementals, that would save me a lot of tapes, but I would need a LOT of tapes to restore all the data. Usually I only need a few of these files at a time so that might be OK.

The other question I had was about retention. How smart is the tape expiration logic? If have a more recent incremental that is depending on a full backup that is older than the media set expiration, will it keep the tapes past expiration date to preserve the full?

[HannesK]

Hello,

If I do a weekly full, is it going to write all 30TB to tape every weekend?

"full" means "everything". Yes.

Yes, full backups are kept as long as incremental backups rely on them. Otherwise the incrementals would be useless.

Best regards,
Hannes

[TaylorB]

Thanks. That is what I thought would happen. I just wanted to make sure, as with regular veeam backups to tape, the full does not seem to copy everything every run.