Discussions related to exporting backups to tape and backing up directly to tape.
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mkretzer
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Is there any way to recover tape failures in a session?

Post by mkretzer »

Hello,

in the last weeks every now and then we had issues with defective tapes which causes our rather big jobs to fail. We can restart the backup and it will continue writing to a new tape. Oftentimes, the failures happen after 1 TB or so.

Is there any way to write the backups from the defective tape to another tape? Right now with monthly sets we always have to store the problematic tape with the other tapes and hope that at least that one TB is readable. Problem is that if we need to catalog the tape fully (for example after loosing the whole backup server) we cannot do this as often the catalog fails because of the CRC error after 1 TB in this example.

What happens if we mark the problematic tape as free? Will the files on that tape be re-written for the backup set after re-starting the job again?

Markus
david.domask
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Re: Is there any way to recover tape failures in a session?

Post by david.domask »

Hi mkretzer,

Sorry to hear about the challenges; regarding what to do with the defective tapes, you can try a Tape Copy or even from the Files Tab locate the files that had been successfully written to the tape, right-click the file and attempt a restore. I am somewhat expecting you might still get the CRC error, but it's worth checking as should be a fast test.

Marking the tape as free should help here, as Veeam will "forget" about the backups on that tape and if they still exist on the repository, Veeam should see them as new for Backup to Tape jobs using Simple Media Pools. With Tape GFS, probably a one-off file to tape job (or backup to tape job) would be best bet here to catch the missed backup files.
David Domask | Product Management: Principal Analyst
mkretzer
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Re: Is there any way to recover tape failures in a session?

Post by mkretzer »

Sadly we use GFS... So GFS won't recognize that some VM restore points of that month are not on tape right now?
david.domask
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Re: Is there any way to recover tape failures in a session?

Post by david.domask » 1 person likes this post

Hi mkretzer,

Ah, there is actually a catch built in for GFS, apologies I had not mentioned it.

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120
If there is a technical problem, for example, the tape library is offline, or the backup server is down, the GFS job will not run. When the problem is fixed, the GFS job will archive one most recent missed full backup for each media set.
So for Tape GFS, it will grab them on the next GFS run.
David Domask | Product Management: Principal Analyst
mkretzer
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Re: Is there any way to recover tape failures in a session?

Post by mkretzer »

Thank you!

So to clarify: We mark the defective tape as free, and re-start the job (normal run) and it should write again the data of the problematic tape? That would be excellent!
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Re: Is there any way to recover tape failures in a session?

Post by david.domask »

Yep, should be all you need. Keep in mind, this mechanism works by checking what days the job _should_ have had GFS points on tape; if some are missing, it will try to find the most appropriate point on the repository to fill that missing GFS point, but retention may clear the points before it can work.

I did do a quick sanity-check test in my lab (just marked as free all my tapes for GFS media pool), and the Tape GFS job wrote the backup files to the appropriate GFS media sets as expected, but there are limits to this feature as noted above. Use File to Tape or a one-off Backup to Tape job to tape-out backups in such a case.
David Domask | Product Management: Principal Analyst
mkretzer
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Re: Is there any way to recover tape failures in a session?

Post by mkretzer » 1 person likes this post

It works perfectly! Thank you very much!
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