Tape backup was not created for <DATE>: there are no new restore points between <DATE> and <DATE>

[piratefish0815]

Hi everybody.

every week in our weekly GFS Tape Job I get the following warning:

Tape backup was not created for <DATE>: there are no new restore points between <DATE> and <DATE>

It is always the same date in January of this year. I assume that there was some missed Backup Jobs back then. I don't know exactly because that was before I worked at my current job. I would like to get rid of this warning though. Now this Thread (tape-f29/warning-in-gfs-weekly-backup-t61461.html) suggests that disabling and enabling the Tape Job will clear this warning. I have a fw questions though.

Do I read it correctly that disabling and immediatley enabling the Tape Job cleares this warning?

What exactly does it mean that the Job 'forgets' about previous GFS dates and backups? Does it just mean that Backups that where not yet written to tape will not be written to tape after disabling/enabling the job? Will I still be able to recover from old tapes or is there something lost?

Do I assume correctly that the right moment to disable and enable the Tape Job would be right after it finished running and before the next Backup Job has started so that no unwritten Backups remain and can be 'forgotten' afterwards?

Please excuse me if the questions I'm asking are noobish. I am new to Veeam and don't want to f up our Backups.

Your answers are appreciated. Thanks.

- piratefish

[FreddyN]

Hi

Was on my way to create the same topic.
Already tried to disable and enable the job, didn't help.

If I check whats on tape, the reported VM is backed up.

Best regards
Freddy

[piratefish0815]

Hi Freddy,

good of you to share your results. Thanks!

Does anybody have a solution for the problem? Any way to get rid of the warning? While not a critical problem the warning every week is very annoying.

-piratefish

[david.domask]

Do I read it correctly that disabling and immediatley enabling the Tape Job cleares this warning?

Potentially. The warning means that there is a GFS period that it missed and wants to back fill OR that there is a backup chain the tape job previously worked with that is no longer producing new points for the tape job to archive. There are a few other reasons the message may appear, but these are typically most common we see in Support.

What exactly does it mean that the Job 'forgets' about previous GFS dates and backups? Does it just mean that Backups that where not yet written to tape will not be written to tape after disabling/enabling the job? Will I still be able to recover from old tapes or is there something lost?

GFS tracks the last enable/disable time of the Tape GFS job, and this can be used to set a "minimum creation date" for eligible candidates. When the GFS candidate selector considers which on-disk backups to check, that minimum creation date will be an additional factor to decide. For example, suppose on disk you have:

file_name, creation_date
VBK 1, 2023-11-22-09:00:00
VBK 2, 2023-10-24-09:00:00
VBK 3, 2023-11-24-09:00:00

You disable and re-enable the Tape GFS job on 2023-11-24 at 08:00; VBK 1 and VBK 2 would not be considered for the Tape GFS job as their creation date is less than the re-enable time.

Do I assume correctly that the right moment to disable and enable the Tape Job would be right after it finished running and before the next Backup Job has started so that no unwritten Backups remain and can be 'forgotten' afterwards?

Yes, because it would be applied against _all_ primary jobs added to the Tape job

Please excuse me if the questions I'm asking are noobish. I am new to Veeam and don't want to f up our Backups.

No worries better to ask than struggle I think.

Just some advice if the disable/re-enable doesn't work long term -- check if you have machines in the source backups that were no longer processed by the job but still have backups in the backup set (under Home > Backups > Disk or Disk (Copy)). If you do, this can trigger it, and you can prevent the warning by either just detaching those backups from the primary job (v12 and later feature), enabling Deleted Machine Retention, or simply deleting that backup chain from the UI.

If none of it works, Support case is the best way, just export the Tape GFS job logs (https://veeam.com/kb1832, first radio option, pick the Tape GFS job and the source job that the warning relates to) -- Support should be able to check fairly fast what triggers it.

[piratefish0815]

Hi David,

thank you for your reply and insights. Much appreciated!
I will see what I can do with that information.

-piratefish

[piratefish0815]

One more question: Is there some documentation I can read up on regarding this topic specifically? GFS Tape Jobs and how they work? I'd like to learn.

- piratefish

[david.domask]

Hi @piratefish0815, you are welcome for the post and hope it helps.

As for more details on GFS, we have the workflow in our User Guide here: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120

When I was on Support T1 for Veeam and even now, I usually just re-read this page fast for Tape GFS cases and get the business logic "hot" in my mind, and then it's pretty fast to understand how the candidate selection works. In short though for a TL;DR:

1. Tape GFS begins its scan of the jobs/repositories added at the GFS scan time set
2. Tape GFS figures out what GFS periods (daily, weekly, etc) are applicable for today then begins checking the backups for jobs/repositories added to find "candidate" backup files that best meet the GFS period for the current day, as well as checking if the Tape GFS job needs to "fill" any missed GFS periods (up to 2 previous missed periods can be recovered like this)
3. The candidate selection works as described in the link above: if the most recent available point is a Full backup, copy it to tape as GFS candidate. If most recent available point is an incremental backup, make a Virtual Full backup for the elder GFS media sets (weekly and older)
4. For Daily (if enabled), any increment that is not yet on tape and doesn't fit into an elder GFS media set goes to the Daily media set. On some occasions if the incremental points cannot be linked to a full backup in Weekly media set, a full backup will be made on tape for the Daily media set.

This is simplified and there are edge cases as described in the link above, but let me know if this helps.

[piratefish0815]

Hi David,

thank you for the quick explanation and for the link. I think I need to make some time to read up more on Veeam in general.

As for the Warning in the weekly Tape Job. I did not have time to try the suggested fix as there were more pressing matters at hand. Two weeks ago our yearly backup job ran. Since then the warning on the weekly Tape Job has not been logged again. Seems that if you don't have time to fix this problem and wait long enough it goeas away on its own.

- piratefish