Using 2 Tape Drives Veeam uses too many tapes

[Valkyyria]

Dear All,

We are using an ML3 Library with 2 Drives. Right now we use 2 LTO8 Tapes per Full Backup, which is enough for our amount of data.

As of some weeks I have seen Veeam using 3 Tapes for a full backup eventhough one of the initial 2 Tapes still has some free space, that doesnt get utilized correctly.

So at the end, we do have:
- 1 Tape completely Full
- 1 Tape with only 400GB of backups on it
- 1 Tape with 800GB free

So my question would be, why the 800GB of the second tape dont get utilized, but instead veeam starts a new tape. I know in some weeks we will have to use a third tape, as backups are growing anyway, but I would like to check for the future, that my configuration is correct.

MediaPool Setup:
- Create new media set for every backup session
- Enable parallel processing for jobs using this media pool - activated
- Enable parallel processing for backup chains within a single tape job . activated

We have 7 disk backups going to tape. They are all using "Per VM Backup Files".

[soncscy]

Hi Valkyyria,

It's hard to say without seeing how the drives are being used, but my guess is that this is media set related.

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110

Note that with parallel processing (which you have enabled), a new media set is opened for each drive used. If I had a guess, what "might" be happening is that you have some backups being written to a secondary media set, while the first media set is using the first two tapes to almost full capacity.

Review the above and just double-check from the job window how the drives are getting used, and it should clear this up for you.

[Dima P.]

- 1 Tape completely Full
- 1 Tape with only 400GB of backups on it
- 1 Tape with 800GB free

With parallel processing into two drives you have two media sets written at the same time (means that two tapes are requested). Looks like one tape was completely full and job used new tape to continue the parallel processing to the second drive. Cheers!