Tape Retention and Tape-Back-To-Disk Questions

[CBlackmer]

I’m doing some fine tuning on my new Veeam 7 environment.

We are using a Cybernetics IScsi SAN for disk space for the repository and there is a LTO6 physical tape drive attached. We cut a weekly tape from repository for offsite storage and bring the tape back the next week. This is a scheduled job and is working fine (I stick a tape in, inventory the drive, move it to the Media Pool 1 referenced in the job, the job runs over the weekend, when I walk in on Monday I have my tape). The tapes (currently) get re-used after five weeks.

I’d like to be able to keep the historic backups available after I reuse the tape (n.b. our “live” repository has room for a month’s worth of reverse incrementals in our environment).

Right now I’m taking my oldest tape and doing a “restore from tape” to a newly-created and clearly-labeled repository (e.g. "December Archive"), but it’s a tedious and lengthy process and creates “Imported” jobs on my sidebar. For the current info, I was thinking I could create a new iSCSI SAN disk (I have a respectable chunk of un-allocated and available space) and copy the contents of the main one over (it can become a repository if needed). But I’m looking for some guidance/best practices here.

• I set up the media sets for the tapes with the backup dates and the other defaults. Did I do this wrong for tapes that will need to be overwritten with new data? If so, what should I be doing for them? (E.g. "Always continue using same media set" and/or "No Tape Protection").
• I am planning to get some more tapes as well and just not overwrite one set a month. (We can fit about a month of backups for our “data” servers on the tape.) But keeping 3 or so months on the much faster SAN disk would be awesome. It’s pretty rare that we have to restore from more than a couple weeks back, but I’d like to be able to do it fast!

ALSO: Current Veeam is 7.0.0.715. Should this be patched for tape enhancements?

many thanks for guidance!

[veremin]

Hi, Charlotte,

Your current approach looks complex, indeed. From my perspective, if you want to store monthly worth backup for long-term retention purpose, you'd better utilize backup copy job, since it was designed specifically for this purpose.

In the settings of backup copy job you should set "Copy every" interval to 30 days, and point the job to whatever location you want to.

Thanks.