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Marco31
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Retention Policy Tape Backup - "too precise"?

Post by Marco31 »

I have a file to tape job with an 7-day-retention policy. So when last backup was written on monday, the tape should be overwritten on monday next week. And here comes the problem: Veeam sets the retention time to the exact time the first tape is written. For example job is scheduled for 9:00 pm, the tape writer (and so the retention time) starts a few minutes later (9:02 pm).
So on next monday, veeam checks exactly at 9:00 pm if there are any tapes accessible - an there are none at this time, because retention time will be expired at 9:02 pm! So there will be a warning that no tapes for the job are accessible. Normally, if the job isn't started much later than the schedule, one of the retries will notice that now (9:02 pm) there is a tape accessible and will start backup.

But what if the tape job is delayed because the job before the tape job takes longer than expected? The job will fail cause of no usable tapes...

How to resolve this problem? Setting retention to 6 days is not a good idea, if one job needs another tape it might use the tape that's in reality still in retention time...

Maybe there is some technical solution you can implement in the future? I don't know how, but the Software we used before for Tape Backup somehow handled this problem...
Mildur
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Re: Retention Policy Tape Backup - "too precise"?

Post by Mildur »

Hi Marco

Use two tapes and set the retention to 13 days. Each week use another tape.
Having only 1 Tape and overwrite the entire content leaves you without any copy of data on tape while the job is running. What happens when your backup server is attacked while the job writes the tape on monday?
We also recommend to take out the tape from the drive. When the tape is in the drive, an attacker can erase it.

Best,
Fabian
Product Management Analyst @ Veeam Software
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