Moving tapes between pools without marking as free

[TommyB]

Hi,

I have now been using VBR tape backup for over two weeks and have 10 tapes with data - the first three tapes hold backups back to May 2013 when I started using Veeam 6.5 and I would like to keep those backups for a while.

So I created a new media pool called "archive", but when I try to move those tapes to the new pool it asks me if I want to mark them as "free" - which is not what I want to do.

Obviously I have not yet fully understood the concept of media pools.

So do I just have put those tapes physically away and keep them in "weekly backup" pool?

I would like to avoid this because it makes managing tapes confusing.

Thomas

[veremin]

Hi, Thomas.

Media pool is more about cassette storage, while, media set is a portion of it. There is a good post that describes it in detail; so, kindly take a look.

As far as I can understand, you’re more after “vault” option or, in other words, the concept of offsite place to where the tapes that hold backup data are taken. If so, please be aware, that there is no such functionality in the current product version, so, you should, probably, use media “description” field as the place where the name of corresponding vault can be written.

However, according to a plan, the tape vault reporting staff should be present in one of the future releases.

Thanks.

[danatk]

I have a strange situation with my tape backups....we have a media pool called 'Archive' which has permanent overwrite protection. The idea is that once a month we move a set of full backup tapes into this pool and they are sent to the offsite store for permanent archive.

Today was the first day we tested this procedure. I moved the tapes from their usual 'Full Backups' pools to the 'Archive' pool - the system locked up for a while, and when it came back to life I found that all my tape jobs had started running! Our tape jobs are set to run continuously when new backup files appear.

What is even stranger is that the jobs have picked tapes from the 'Archive' pool and are writing to them. All the jobs are targeted at the 'Full Backup' pools, so no way should they pick tapes from the 'Archive' pool, nor should they even be running...

I will raise a support call, just wanted to check if anyone else has seen strange behaviour with continuous tape jobs when moving tapes between pools.

thanks,
Dan.

[Dima P.]

Hello Dan,

I am not sure I am on the same page: you move written tapes from one media pull to another and then export them? Why I am asking - when you move tapes between media pools they are marked as free and eventually will be overwritten

[danatk]

Hello - maybe I have misunderstood how we can use media pools.

What I want to be able to do is move tapes to an offsite archive, and have them overwrite protected in Veeam.

i.e. tapes in my 'full backup' pool only have 4 weeks overwrite protection, so the idea is that once a month I move a set of these tapes into the 'Archive' pool which is set to never overwrite, then physically move the tapes to my off-site vault. This would mean that the tapes are clearly shown in Veeam as being in the archive, and cannot be overwritten by Veeam should they accidentally end up back in the tape library.

[Dima P.]

Dan,

Currently you can set retention only per media pool, and once it is done it affects all the tapes in the media pool. However, when you move tape media to another pool - retention would be overwritten, and tape would be marked as free.

At the current version of tape feature you can achieve archiving only by setting up 2 different tape jobs, with different schedule and to separate media pools with separate retention: one pair for daily full backups with short retention- another for archiving with long retention (or never overwrite option).

[danatk]

OK thanks for the explanation, although I can see no logic in why a tape would get marked as 'free' when you move it to a new media pool. I would expect it to just take on the overwrite protection of the new media pool and be available for append/overwrite as appropriate in that pool. This is how it works in other tape software I've used. I don't see any reason not to have it work this way, and presently there is no way to move tapes to a vault and ensure they have full overwrite protection in Veeam.

Also there is definitely some bug, because when I moved my tapes to my 'Archive' pool every tape job in my list started, picked tapes from the wrong media pool and applied a media set name from a different pool

I have a ticket open with support and took some screenshots when it happened, so hopefully they can work out what happened.

[Dima P.]

Dan,

there is no way to move tapes to a vault and ensure they have full overwrite protection in Veeam

We are working on it

I have a ticket open with support and took some screenshots when it happened, so hopefully they can work out what happened.

Please, update this thread with the case number so we could track the changes. Thank you.

[danatk]

case number is 00484763

[danatk]

quick update - support confirmed that tapes can't be moved between media sets as I thought they could. When my tapes were moved, they were marked as free and the backups they contained were therefore removed from the catalog, thus causing all the backup jobs to start as they detected files on disk that were no longer on tape.

the strange use of different media pool / set tapes appears to be a bug and this has been passed to R&D for investigation.

[Dima P.]

Dan, thank you for the update. I will ask QA to take a look at your case.

[swire]

Please let us know when a patch becomes available for the issue,
Thanks,
Tim

[Dima P.]

Tim,
If you faced the same issue, please, create a support case, provide all the troubleshooting info, and update case id to this thread. Thank you.