Last Backup to tape - Forward Incremental with Active Full

[timmi2704]

Good morning,

I really like the "new" feature of only copying the latest backup files to tape.
However:
When a media set expires, its tapes will be overwritten.
With the next backup to tape job run, the old overwritten files will be copied to tape (bad) as well as the most recent files (good).
These written TeraBytes of the old backup files are unneccessary.

The only solutions I see are:
1. Increasing the retention time in the media pool --> Not possible as there are not enough tapes/slots available
2. Re-adding all source backup jobs to its tape jobs with the 'latest' option

Is there something I am missing?
Is this expected behaviour?

Thanks a lot for your help.

[veremin]

Another solution might be switch to forward forever incremental mode and leveraging virtual synthesized full backup. Thanks.

[timmi2704]

So the behaviour mentioned above is indeed to be expected?

Switching to forward forever incremental is not really an option as I do not like having too many increment depending on an old full backup (or synthetically created full backups.

[veremin]

The said functionality makes tape job disregard everything but the last chain of backup job. However, it's one time procedure, meaning that if starting from the moment when the tape job was created some files have been written to tapes and erased afterwards, and those files are still present on disks, they will be copied to tapes again. So, the described behaviour is expected indeed.

[timmi2704]

Thanks, Vladimir.
As I am really 'suffering' from this behaviour, do you think an automated PowerShell Script might be able to re-create the jobs with the 'latest' setting enabled once a week? Or is there any better solution apart from switching to forever inctemental?

[veremin]

If you're after scripting, you'll need to use file to tape job, instead of backup to tape one, as currently there are no commandlets to make the latter archive only the latest portion of the chain.

In contrast, it's not that hard to set via PS file to tape job to copy only the latest .vbk.

Thanks.

[michaelryancook]

The only issue with scripting with PS is that even though the Veeam console shows the job was successful, you do not see what is on the tape without drilling down within the tape media section. It does not display under backups -- tape and Veeam is not aware of how many restoration points you have on tape for each VM then either.

[veremin]

You can use Files node to see what files have been archived to tapes and where they currently reside. Thanks.

[michaelryancook]

Thanks Vladimir. I see that I can see the .vbk in that section. It still does not allow me to expand to see the VMs within the vbk which would be quite handy.

[Shestakov]

Michael, as we discussed in the relevant topic, since file-to-tape job copies files, for Veeam B&R .vbk is just a file, like .txt, .xls etc. In contrast, backup-to-tape job can copy only backups, that`s why VBR UI shows them as restore points containing backups of vms.
Thanks.