Backing up to tape question

[KFM]

Hi guys,

Hoping I can reach out to the excellent Veeam community and get some thoughts and feedback about a problem I have. I'm sure I'm not the only one to have hit this problem so I'm hoping that somebody has some hints and tips.

The environment in a nutshell:

Nightly backup jobs of all VMs at production site

1. These are all reverse incrementals
2. Keeping 28 retention points

Daily backup copy jobs copy the previous night's backups to the DR site

1. These have a daily sychronisation interval
2. Keeping 7 retention points
3. No GFS due to lack of space in repository

I want to backup (using either the nightly backup or the backup copy) monthly to tape. I can either use *cough* Symantec Backup Exec *cough* or Veeam to write to tape. Some of the backups are relatively small however some are quite bit ( > 5 TB). For the small backups I don't foresee any problems as the tape job will finish well before the next backup/backup copy job starts. However for the big backups that will take more than a backup interval (24 hrs) to send to tape how do I deal with locked files? e.g. Veeam locking a file during a transform. I can't disable a backup or backup copy job during the tape job because if the tape job takes 36 hrs to complete then I would have missed one night's/day's backup which is unacceptable.

If I use Veeam's tape mechanism then when a backup job starts it will cancel the running tape job rendering the tape backup useless.

Am I trying to do the impossible with Veeam's relatively limited job scheduling and tape options?

I guess the crux of the problem is what to do when your tape backups take longer than the backup interval of your backup/backup copy. e.g. if it takes 34 hours to backup a VBK to tape yet my Veeam backup of that VBK happens every 24 hours?

Any hints/help/tips would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
KFM

[veremin]

I don't think there are a lot options available for you. From my perspective you can:

1) Either split the existing job into small ones and copy the resulting jobs on different schedule, so that, the backup, backup copy, backup to tape jobs aren't overlapped.
2) Or switch to forward incremental mode, so that, the corresponding backup files aren't transformed/locked on regular basis (as is the case with reversed incremental mode) and can be copied smoothly by backup to tape job.

Thanks.

[Vitaliy S.]

Also you may want to consider copying existing VBK file to any local folder and then using file to tape job to send this data to tapes. Keep in mind that with this approach you will not be able to track what VMs are on tapes within the backup console.

[KFM]

Thank you both for your suggestions!

In response to your questions, unfortunately there is not enough space to copy all the VBKs, once a month, to then back them up to tape. Ditto with converting the jobs to forward incrementals. With regards to splitting the jobs, I can't do that for some of the larger servers which are 3TB and 6TB in size.

I'm thinking that right now my best bet is to wait for future product enhancements to Veeam. Specifically the ability to run backup to tape jobs using the backup copy as a source! I think that would be a god send for a lot of people. Also would it be possible to implement GFS off the primary backup stream as opposed to the backup copy?

[veremin]

Specifically the ability to run backup to tape jobs using the backup copy as a source! I

We're currently looking into adding this functionality down the road. Chances are, one of the next product releases will be able to boast with it.

Also would it be possible to implement GFS off the primary backup stream as opposed to the backup copy?

I don't think we will implement GFS retention scheme for primary backup job, as it does not correlate well with the main purpose of primary backup job (short retention, fast restore), while it perfectly does with that of backup copy job (long-term retention, etc.).

Thanks.