Tape Retries and Specific Backup Chain to Tape Request

[kerard]

Hello,

I have been working through a Backup to Tape failure that happened in our Veeam environment and would like to request some features that would be helpful to me (and hopefully others). Our primary backup strategy is to take 32 restore points and hold them on disk (SOBR, Server 2016, ReFS) with synthetic full backups created each week on Sunday. Our primary archive method is to ship backups to another SOBR at our DR site. Our secondary archive method is Backup to Tape. Backups are saved to tape for compliance reasons at my company, and they are stored offsite. Once per month, we must take the restore point from the 1st of the month and any parts of the backup chain it depends on and save it to tape. We do not send all available backup chains to tape, only the most recent. Our entire production environment must be sent to tape (dev, too). The goal is to have our Sunday synthetic full backup plus any successful incremental up to our point in time on tape.

This month, two larger backups to tape failed to finish due to timeouts waiting on resources. I was able to construct a file list that gave me all missed VM VBK and VIB files and assemle a File to Tape Backup job with them using Veeam's Powershell module. There were 365 different files needed, so I did not want to click through them. Additionally, I needed the specific point in time from the start of the month (just a business requirement), so I could not just re-run the job.

I'd like to know if an easy "retry" feature could be added to the Veeam Backup console UI for tape jobs, just like a regular backup job. It doesn't seem to exist today. Does Veeam already know which portions of the job failed to complete? If so, can it retry?

Also, I'd like to know if it's possible to add a feature that would allow selection of restore points on demand, then write them to tape while also calculating the recovery point's dependencies (other VIBs and VBK). For example, let's say I need October 10 2018's restore point on tape but it's not part of a regular backup to tape job. I'd like to see an ad-hoc job feature that could take my desired point in time for a given VM and write it to tape.

Hopefully I've articulated my request well enough. Thanks for reading!

[Dima P.]

Hello and welcome to Veeam forums Kenneth.

Thank you for your feature requests!

I'd like to know if an easy "retry" feature could be added to the Veeam Backup console UI for tape jobs, just like a regular backup job. It doesn't seem to exist today. Does Veeam already know which portions of the job failed to complete? If so, can it retry?

Indeed tape job cannot retry itself (since it cannot continue the previously interrupted tape data stream) but I've added your vote to this feature request.

Also, I'd like to know if it's possible to add a feature that would allow selection of restore points on demand, then write them to tape while also calculating the recovery point's dependencies (other VIBs and VBK). For example, let's say I need October 10 2018's restore point on tape but it's not part of a regular backup to tape job. I'd like to see an ad-hoc job feature that could take my desired point in time for a given VM and write it to tape.

So you would like to create an ad-hoc backup to tape for a desired part of backup chain?

[ers_kentwick]

Our site is going to have a complete network outage this Saturday (main core switches are being replace and can't do a "stair-step" cutover).
So the question: We have long running tape copy jobs that may end or start during the network outage. If we disable the tapecopy job while it is running, wait until the outage is complete and then re-enable the tapecopy job, will the job just pick up where it left off (that it will recognize that 25 out of 48 backups have successfully been copied, one in flight is suspect and there are 12 backups yet to copy). Also, will it re-copy the entire in-flight backup or try to complete the interrupted copy?

Or will it attempt to copy everything all over again?

Right now our intention is to disable the tape copy jobs sometime Friday night and then start them after the outage is complete.

[veremin]

Or will it attempt to copy everything all over again?

This. Thanks!