Totally new (and desperate) to tape libraries

[tinto1970]

hi all,

it's my very first time i have to work with a tape library, and it's really difficult for me to find tips and understand basic concepts.
I've read the offical documentation but for a newbie is hard to understand which kind of jobs use, how manage tapes, how to pick them up to store in a different location and so on. Especially concetps like "media pool", "media set" and "media vault" are not as clear.

My library has 7 slots (1 used by the cleaning) in LTO-8 (10 TB per tape).
My Veeam repository is, at the moment 13 TB (Veeam One says: Full 8.5 TB, Increment 4.5 TB). I guess 1 Tape can contain 'everything'.
I have bought 8 Tapes.

My primary goal at the moment would be something like this:
- every sunday i copy the last full restore points to tape
- every first monday of the month, i extract the tape and store it as "monthly", i insert the previous used "monthly" and i start overwriting.
- every first monday of the year, i extract the tape and store it as "yearly".

Is the GFS Job the correct one for this? I guess so.

P.S.: the Library is already connected (FC via switch) to the Tape Server. The Tape Server is a physical machine, the backup files are hosted on the same machine: this should allow tape jobs to be "lan free".

Thanks in advance for any help/link/clarification

... i have created a job with these settings

Weekly backup: Sunday
Monthly backup: First Sunday of the month
Quarterly: disabled
Yearly: First Sunday of the year

I also set up to eject media upon completion and to export media sets (it's also difficult to understand the difference between these two options).

Am i on the right path?

[tinto1970]

update: i tried launching the backup: average write speed was 50 MB/s (native speed for LTO-8 is over 300) with a peak of 120 MB/s.

I've stopped it after 10 minutes (i know it was too early, but i don't want to interfere with nightly backups), it says
Busy: Source 97% > Proxy 19% > Network 9% > Target 14%

what (probably) does it mean? The repository is too slow in "creating" files to be copied on tape?

[csydas]

Hi Alessandro,

Veeam has a few catches with full backups -- do you see it mentioning "Synthetic Fulls"? If so it's generating a full backup from an incremental one, which might be slower than you expect.

Basically my experience is that Tape with Veeam is way easier to manage if you just make sure you Tape Jobs run on the same day that a Full Backup is made. Also a catch -- Veeam understand a job's "day" as the day it starts, not the day the file is made. If your Backup job does a Full on Friday, set your tape job to run on Friday also, etc.

[tinto1970]

thank you for your answer!
mmm my backup jobs are all like this

-incremental
- create synthetic full backups periodically unchecked

you mean this is not good for moving backup files to tape, because when the backup job runs, it has to build a new synthetic full backup file?

(my repo is on ReFS, fastclone enabled)

[tinto1970]

I have opened Case # 03215588 to get in touch with support

[csydas]

I wouldn't say it's good, I wouldn't say it's bad, it's just it can be an issue.

With your setup, it will make the Visual Synthetic Fulls, though it's a little surprising if it's ReFS. Let's see what support says