Restore from tape after subscription license expires (past grace period)

[glosolinf]

Hi,
I'm planning long-term readability of an existing tape archive and want to confirm the expected behaviour before the license expires.

Setup:
VBR 13.0.1, Subscription license.
Tapes written by a Backup to Tape job, plus one File to Tape job.
The expired license file will stay installed — no switch to Community Edition.

The documentation states that once the grace period ends, workloads are no longer processed and existing jobs fail, but "you will be able to restore machine data from existing backups".

My question: does this cover tape?
Specifically:
1/ "Restore backup files from tape to repository" — still available with an expired license?
2/ Restoring files written by a File to Tape job?
3/ Is the tape catalog in the configuration database still queryable, or does anything become read-only/blocked?

I've tested both operations successfully while still within the grace period, so this is purely about what changes once the grace period ends.

Thanks.

[david.domask]

Hi glosolinf, welcome to the forums.

Yes, restores are always possible with the community edition, including tape.

Catalog operation is also supported.

[glosolinf]

Thanks David, that's very helpful.

One clarification: our environment has 16 VMs, so Community Edition's 10-workload limit would be a concern.
We intend to keep the expired Subscription license file installed rather than switching to CE.

Does the workload count limit apply to restore operations, or only to backup jobs?

In other words, with the expired Subscription license in place, can we still restore any of the 16 VMs from tape without hitting a licensing limit?

Thanks again.

[david.domask]

Happy to help.

Does the workload count limit apply to restore operations, or only to backup jobs?

Only for protecting workloads. So if you remove the license and go to Community Edition, IIRC it will throw a warning every time you open console about exceeding the limit, but you will still be able to run the workloads licensed with community edition & restore from everything.

Keep in mind, for File to Tape if you're backing up Veeam backup files, they are excluded from licensing requirements. So license does not apply at all with File to Tape & Veeam backups.

[glosolinf]

Thanks David, that's exactly what I needed — much appreciated.
Good to know the File to Tape exclusion applies to Veeam backup files as well; that hadn't been obvious to me from the docs.