Simple Tape Strategy

[nozmac]

Hi,

I have a number of backup jobs (to disk) for both Hyper-V and Window agent configured as forward incremental (not forward forever), with a Synthetic Full on Saturday

I would like to implement a simple "to Tape " strategy to mirror what I have in my "To Disk" jobs, namely incremental backups for each Weekday (Mon-Fri) then on Saturday perform a full backup.

It would appear that this is not possible insofar as Tape backups require the last full from disk in addition to incrementals after that last full backup.

Is it just not possible to have an incremental backup to tape that includes just incrementals ?

Thanks in advance

Andy

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums.

Is it just not possible to have an incremental backup to tape that includes just incrementals ?

uhm, what would you do with the incrementals? they are useless without full backup. there is no way to restore anything from an incremental file without full backup.

Best regards,
Hannes

[nozmac]

Indeed incrementals are useless without the previous full backup.. So is what I'm trying to do impossible with Veeam ?

With the above "To Disk" jobs configured, what would I expect the see on my daily backup tapes each weekday, and at weekends using a nonGFS media pool ?

Sat - Full backup
Sun - ?
Mon - Full and Inc
Tue - Full + Mon Inc + Tue Inc
Wed - Full + Mon Inc + Tue Inc + Wed Inc
Thu - Full + Mon Inc + Tue Inc + Wed Inc + Thu Inc
Fri -Full + Mon Inc + Tue Inc + Wed Inc + Fri Inc

or

Sat - Full backup
Sun - ?
Mon - Full and Inc
Tue - Full made up of combined Monday tape + Tue Inc
Wed - Full made up of combined Monday tape + Wed Inc
Thu - Full made up of combined Monday tape + Wed Inc
Fri - Full made up of combined Monday tape + Wed Inc

I need this information as we have limited tape storage capacity and are unable to calculate what capacity we need

Any further help would be greatly appreciated

[HannesK]

Hello,
I believe what you try is possible. It just looks like I misunderstood something.

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=100
If you run daily backup to tape jobs and activate "archive incremental backups to tape", then you get the following on tape:

Sat: Full
Sun: if no backups configured, then nothing gets copied to tape
Mon: Mon Inc
Tue: Tue Inc
Wed: Wed Inc
Thu: Thu Inc
Fri: Fri Inc
Sat: Full

A backup to tape job just copies the vbk / vib files in your setup (forward incremental with synthetic full). There is no combination or anything like that.

If you use one media pool for fulls and incrementals, then the tape consumption will be the lowest possible.

Best regards,
Hannes