V10 Tape Performance Question

[JoshL]

For my use case I have a ~500TB NAS that needs to be backed up to tape (LTO6 library connected to a separate backup server, and 10G networking between them). A couple years ago I tried Veeam file to tape to solve this, and while it was amazingly easy to set up, the performance was pretty abysmal when it came to copying a large number of small files to tape, the result of which was the drive shoe shinning really bad. It would write for literally a few seconds, then have to back up, write for a few seconds, etc. I also tried some of the larger files, and while it was vastly improved, it was still a slight issue (and unfortunately, the small files are roughly 20% of the storage).

This lead me to use Bareos, which was a nightmare to set up, but it has a feature which allows you to use some local storage as a cache for the files, where it will spool the data into the cache, then write that all at once to tape. This completely solved my problem with the shoe shining, but I would really like to switch back over to Veeam for many reasons. I did see v10 added NAS support, but I see that doesn't support tape. My question is, has there been any improvements in v10 when it comes to file to tape performance, or even better yet, is there a way to spool files similarly to Bareos? If not, is there any plans to implement this?

[Gostev]

Hi, Josh. There were indeed some major performance improvements for F2T jobs since you implemented this solution. I believe most significant improvements were made in 9.5 Update 4. However, keep in mind F2T job is not designed to handle more than a few millions of files due to its catalog scalability. Thanks!

[soncscy]

Hey Joshua,

Not sure if it will help here or if this is what Gostev means, but for one of my clients, we found this KB article: https://www.veeam.com/kb3083

This stemmed of a LOT of the slowdown and start/stop for their file backup to tape.

I kind of recommend against a tapeout backup like this, but for us and around 100mil files (I forget the exact size of the data) we got them to a reliable state with Veeam file to tape.

[JoshL]

Thank you both for the responses, I'll have to give it another shot soon. I switched positions almost a year ago and should no longer be in charge of the backup system (and of course the company doesn't want to drop the cash to be able to back up to disk). The new guy is really struggling to understand and modify the config files for Bareos, so Veeam will be an absolute life saver for me. Thanks again!