Tape selection in media pool

[ruud smits]

Hi,
i'm new to Veeam backup and I have a question.
I have setup a Media pool with 4 tapes for a daily full backup, with a retention of 13 days.
As there is enough space on the tape, I would like to append the data to the tape.

Now when the backup start it's asking for a specific tape.
How can I use the software, that it uses the inserted tape, instead of selecting the needed tape itself.
We use a Monday, Tuesday, etc tape.

[PTide]

Hi and welcome to the community,

What settings have you specified in the "Media Set" step of Media Pool settings? It should be "Do not create, always continue using current Media set"

Thank you.

[ruud smits]

Hi,

the setting is set to "do not create, always continue using current media set"

But there where more tape in the daily pool then needed, and the software asked for a tape with no protection anymore, instead of the tape we inserted with enough free capacity.

[PTide]

Ok, just want to clarify something:

When your the media pool is out of free tapes (all four are 100% full) the job asks you for a new tape. You provide it with a new, 5th tape that is completely unrelated to the current media pool and the job tells you that the tape you have provided is protected, is that correct? Also, do you have any eject or export options specified?

Thank you.

[ruud smits]

Hi,

There are now 4 tapes in the pool.
1 for Monday, 1 for Tuesday, 1 for Wednesday and 1 for Thursday.
As there is enough space on the tape, I want to use 2 backup cycles per tape. (retention period of 13 days)
So every Monday, the Monday tape is inserted.
after a job, the tape is written for about 25%
But for example, if the accidentally insert the Wednesday tape, instead of the Thursday, the backup is still possible to run, because there is free space available on the tape.

[PTide]

Even though your Monday tape still has some free space it is considered as "protected" as soon as the job starts writing to the Tuesday tape. The protection will expire after your Monday backup set turns 13 days old.

Thank you.

[ruud smits]

hmmm....then the only option then is to expand the pool with more tapes then I guess.
not used to work like this in comparison with our current backup software.

[PTide]

May I ask you what's the reason why you use a separate Tape for Monday Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday but at the same time you put one of these tapes in your drive on Friday? Would not it be better just to let the tape to get filled by 100% and then insert another one?

Thank you.

[ruud smits]

those tapes go In to a vault.
What's the need of a backup in case of a fire and the most recent backup tape from a week is still in the unit. You lose then a larger amount of data.
(worst case offcoarse)
the Friday/week/month tapes have another retention period, so they have a separate pool.

[ruud smits]

but if you mention the tape can get filled till it's full.
Why does my setup not work, it can append, but not to the tape I want to insert.

[PTide]

If you stop writing to one tape (Tape A) that is in the media set and start writing to the other one (Tape B) from the same media set then Tape A gets marked as "closed" in a Veeam database and nothing can be written to it until its retention (13 days) expires.

Thank you.