Max run time option needed for tape jobs

[chasst]

There was another thread about holiday exclusions. While that would work if you want a hands on process for dealing with holidays or missed days, it is labor intensive. My preference is to set all of my tape jobs to have a maximum run time. My current tape job backs up about 250 gb to tape once per week day. It takes about 14 minutes but if nobody put a tape in the drive on Christmas, it just waits for the next tape and does the backup some time in the middle of the second day and then spits the tape out. If the person changing tapes isn't paying attention, the next nights backup gets missed too and so on.

If you simply time out after 2 hours, the job is canceled and your Friday tape actually backs up Fridays data rather than waiting until Monday mid day.

I think a max run time option is needed for tape backups. It should be optional and it should have an option to notify if canceled due to timeout.

Thanks,
Chass

[Dima P.]

Hello and welcome to the community Chass!

Tape job should await for 72 hours, if there is no available media, by default. Does it work for your environment? Cheers!

[chasst]

No that doesn't work. It needs to be a user setting. 72 hours will mess up the entire schedule. We need to be able to set it to less than 12 hours so that the job is terminated before the next one starts 24 hours later.

Chass

[Dima P.]

As a workaround you can use the following regkey (in minutes)

Code: Select all

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication 
DWORD WaitForValidTapeTimeoutMin

For the setting in the Veeam B&R console I've noted an improvement request. Cheers!