Your Suggestions on our Tape implementation.

[rurouni]

HI All,

I'm posting here to have your advices on our Tape Migration Scenario.

We're actually using HP Dataprotector to perform backup to tape and we plan to manage Tape BAckup migration directly to veeam backup.

We're using Forward+inc Policy with Full on Saturday and inc From Monday-Friday. No BAckups on Sunday.
Retention is set to 6 versions on Disk and 1 month for inc and Full on Tape. We setup monthly jobs from which tapes are kept for 6 Years.

The question here is simple. What are your implementation suggestions to design our Tape backup Jobs?

Some other questions came to my mind while testing by the way:

- When does the Tape Catalog is purged? When the tapes Expires? Never?
- When a tape is write protected forever in veeam, does that mean that the catalog is also keeping those files forever or could it be cleaned up at tapes expiration date for example?
- Is there a possibility that the catalog becoming so huge that the database could not manage a long term history? (that happened to us with dataprotector before, that s why i'm asking)

The second goal here is to implement Vaults properly to manage Tapes outside the datacenter and out of visibility from the Libraries since they are taken in charge by a third party company. We want to be able to reclaim tapes to this third party company anytime during this 6 Years retention period.

Thank you for the suggestions.

[nikpolini]

Hi.

My advice right now would be to wait till V9 before commiting to anything. There are several feature requests pending that will/should help you decision process.

Regards.

[veremin]

What are your implementation suggestions to design our Tape backup Jobs?

A backup to tape job that runs daily (apart from Sunday), and that is pointed to a media pool with 1 month overwrite protection period.

Also, you can add vault and place tapes there for long term archival purpose.

- When does the Tape Catalog is purged? When the tapes Expires? Never?

Information regarding backup stored on tape will be deleted, as soon as overwrite protection period is expired and tape gets erased.

- When a tape is write protected forever in veeam, does that mean that the catalog is also keeping those files forever or could it be cleaned up at tapes expiration date for example?

Write protected tape doesn't have any expiration date, thus, information regarding backups it hosts is stored forever.

- Is there a possibility that the catalog becoming so huge that the database could not manage a long term history? (that happened to us with dataprotector before, that s why i'm asking)

With long term history you'd better install full-blown SQL version, instead of using Express one. This should allow you to be on the safe side.

Thanks.