Tape backup completes "successfully" without writing anything

[Tofild]

Hello all,

we're having a weird issue with our tape jobs, already opened a case for it (07062084) but I kinda got the feeling that it is something stupid that can be fixed by the power of the experienced community.

Here's what's been happening: We recently updated our Veeam B&R to 12.1.0.2131 and ever since that the jobs that write our weekly/monthly backups to tape finish in about 1 minute without actually writing anything.
Tried cloning the tape jobs and ran them again, same result sadly.
We did some experimenting and concluded that the files/folders do not seem to be relevant for this behavior. We were able to reproduce this with our normal weekly backup files as well as with random data, PDFs downloaded from the web, txt files and folders we created ourselves etc. stuff that our Veeam has *never* written to tape or even seen before in any backup job.
Also this is a full backup, not a differential. From what I understand this should simply write the contents of the target to tape as it did so perfectly before updating.


The statistics of those jobs look something like this (target contains one test file and one folder):

10:04:41 Job started at 27.12.2023 10:04:35
10:04:45 Processing tasks 01:26
10:04:45 Building volume list... 00:00
10:04:46 Total backup job size: 1 files and 2 folders (18,7 MB) 00:06
10:04:49 All hosts have been queued for processing
10:05:50 Processing [BACKUP TARGET SERVER] 00:04
10:06:11 1 folders and 0 files backed up
10:06:12 Load: Source 82% > Proxy 0% > Network 0% > Target 0%
10:06:12 Primary bottleneck: Source
10:06:12 Job finished at 27.12.2023 10:06:12

Veeams seems to be able to correctly recognize the contents of the target but doesn't seem to be interested in doing much else with it.

Already took a look at the logs for the job but wasn't able to find anything that jumped out to me, but I'm also not an experienced Veeam user myself, inherited it from a previous admin, never had any serious issues with it though.
But now I'm stumped.

Anybody got any pointers what to look for or what to try?

[Mildur]

Hello Tofild

Thank you for the case number. According to the case notes, this was confirmed as a bug in v12.1. And the bug is scheduled to be fixes with an upcoming cumulative patch.

The workaround is to add *.* or * to the inclusion filter. I believe the workaround was not yet provided to you within the case.

Best,
Fabian


PS: From our top issue topic:

#6: Some File to Tape jobs backup nothing after the upgrade. [FORUM TOPIC]
Scope: Existing File to Tape jobs with a Windows or SMB folder as source + no inclusion or exclusion filters on a folder.
Symptoms: Existing File to Tape jobs backup nothing after the upgrade.
Cause: Regression due to adding advanced inclusion and exclusion filtering functionality. For newly created jobs, every object has an associated filter (. by default if a user does not assign a filter).
Status: To work around the issue, add *.* inclusion filter on all affected data sources. After inclusion filter is full backup will be performed by file to tape job. Bug ID 622679.

[Tofild]

Hello Fabian,

that did the trick! Thank you so much for your quick help!
Our tape backup is running and *writing* again.

Best regards!