Number of times tape has been written to

[snzhang2]

We are using HPE StoreEver MSL6480 Tape Library with Veeam B&R 9.0 to backup our VMware backup. We wanted to know if Veeam B&R can tell how many times a LTO-6 tape has been written to.

[Dima P.]

Hi snzhang2,

Veeam B&R does not track this information. Once we receive the alert that media is expired, it’s going to be moved to expired media pool automatically.

[Shestakov]

Hello Nan,
Could you explain your request, do you need the info to know how old the tape is?
Thanks!

[snzhang2]

The written-to information would be useful if we have, for example, a set of 50 tapes, it would help us balance which ones to use in a rotation.

But based on the reply, it seems that Veeam B&R only looks at the tape media status (expired or not) in determining if it can still be used.

[rreed]

This feature would also be extremely useful in forecasting when to buy new tapes...

[Shestakov]

rreed,
I also thought about that but that may be tricky to count if you write to the different parts of tape, i.e. on Monday you fill the first 20% of LTO-6 and Tuesday the second 20% etc. so by Friday you will have 5 writes on tape which should be count as 1 rather than 5. In another scenario you will not fill the whole tape but reuse some parts more times others.
What do you think?

[rreed]

An excellent point and question. My understanding is as of at least LTO-4, tapes have an on-board RFID chip that holds the tape's read/write history, maybe 1-2 other things. Every time it's used by a drive some data gets written to it, and I believe that's where the tape notifies the drive "hey I'm done, no more." Perhaps you guys could investigate pulling that data to help discern end of life? For me I'm looking more toward end of a given tape's life, rather than a human decision of "I've written to it 200 times, so I'd better go ahead and replace it," if that makes sense.

[Shestakov]

Yeah, we will investigate it, thanks for the feedback!
And how do you currently decide if tape is overused and no data should be written anymore?

[mfo]

This information might be available from your tape vendors tools.
We use a Quantum Autoloader and I can see the wear level of the currently loaded tape in the "Quantum Dashboard" programm.
It gives information on read and written data and a percentage value for wear level.
The downside of this is that you'd have to load every tape manually to examine these values.

[rreed]

This is my first forray into tape w/ Veeam, and since the functionality is not yet there, and our drive/tapes are all very new, I guess we'll wait until a tape just outright breaks or starts having lots of problems. Otherwise, I don't know how we'll know when a tape is at EOL. This is also the first time I've done tape in some years, but I seem to recall other older tape software would warn you when a tape was reaching EOL, or at least give you some sort of "hey you've written to this tape x-amount of times, you should consider retiring it soon."

[Shestakov]

Yeah, as was mentioned above, there is a chip in tapes signalizing tape`s EOL and as Dima wrote above VBR sends those tapes to the "Expired" media pool.
We will work on getting the EOL progress to show VBR customers for how long the tape is expected to operate.
Thanks for your feedbacks!

[snzhang2]

Thanks Nikita. You and the others on this thread have been very informative.

Look forward to seeing the EOL progress feature in VBR in the future. It would be very helpful.

[Dima P.]

Guys,

To be clear. We noted this feature request and will investigate if it’s possible. However, that's not something we are going to include in upcoming release.

[Shestakov]

.. since release is going to be in this month
Nan, you are welcome. Once you have a feedback or question don`t hesitate sharing!

[EnerconIT]

Backup Exec also records the following for individual tapes, we would request these as a feature request also since we have found value in the past before moving to VBR.

Total In Use Hours
Total Mounts
Total Seeks
Total Seek Errors
Total Write Soft Errors
Total Write Hard Errors
Total Read Soft Errors
Total Read Hard Errors

[Shestakov]

Thanks for the feedback, EnerconIT
Looks like a good request for Veeam ONE report.

[UT2015]

Are there any news on this?

Will Veeam be able to display the number of writes per tape/estimate EOL?

It would be more intelligent if Veeam would consider the number of writes per tape when chosing an empty tape to write to than just chosing the tape with the lowest name/number, as Veeam currently does. By this Veeam rewrites the same tapes again and again (for incremental backups), while other tapes are used very seldom/never.

Best regards,
UT2015

[Dima P.]

Hi UT2015,

This feature is planned for the next version (but wont be included in the upcoming Update 3).

[UT2015]

Both features? Meaning Veeam can display number of writes/EOL *and* Veeam is able to automatically chose tape with minimum number of writes?

[Dima P.]

UT2015,

On the first place, we wanted to make tape selection smarter but as a bonus it gave VBR the understanding of tape lifecycle variables.

[Narwhal]

Hi, has this feature been implemented or pushed yet? I'm running Veeam version 9.5.0.1922.

I'd like to know if I'll get some kind of warning or notice to replace aging tapes.

Thanks!

[Poweruser]

yes add all infos backup exec has.
load, usage hours, written/read mb, errors, first use, manuf. date, serial number, codes, etc.

[nathano]

Would also be very useful to have this info, help balance the tape usage across daily/weekly pools and also decide when to move media to the monthly pool for long term retention.