Hi,

Can you confirm the frequency at which you’re hoping to write to tape? I don’t know your data sizes but are you hoping to get every backup to tape? Or just a weekly backup?

Hi Paul,
The frequency of backup to tape is daily, I thought about using the schedule option "As new backup files appear". and yes I plan to make all backups to tape.
Regards
Tommy

The option "As new backup files appear" works fine in such scenarios.

Have to think about your requirements. I am busy today, will do this evening.
If you don’t have a solution until then from my brilliant community colleagues here

Hey @Tommy Armando 

Few points to help you design your strategy.

1. Consider total volume of data that needs to be moved to tape and your LTO generation -- this will heavily determine your tape usage and tape-out strategy
2. To most efficiently use tapes, typically it’s recommended to set Media Set creation to “Do not create, always continue” so that the previous tape is appended.
3. You can force new media set creation in a few ways: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/tape_media_sets.html?ver=110 If you’re offlining the previous tape (vaulting it I suppose), you can manually force your media set creation that way to get distinct media sets that correlate to your tape rotation. This might be a great fit for you

The big question is do you need the incrementals from your source jobs or are you fine with Archival Points? If it’s the latter, then a GFS media pool ought suit you pretty nicely and you can just set Weekly points for your tape-out goals. GFS does have a Daily media set, but this will require a dedicated tape(s). This might actually suit you though if you though, so consider it. The Tape Job will make sure that your incrementals are never “orphaned” and always have a full to refer to, and a side-effect of this is that you might end up with fulls going to the Daily media set.

If you’re more preferring the Full + Increments all the time, a Simple Media pool will suffice, and Veeam will automatically make the new media set when you offline the previous tape.

Hope this helps!

I have some questions/suggestions to your scenario:

• Are the weekly backups intended to create a weekly full restore? If so, is it sufficient to create a synthetic full once a week? This could be accomplished with the daily job and the weekly job would not be necessary… And you don#t have a backup chain consisting of 30 restore points in your daily job. Then each week a new chain is started with the synthetic full. If you are using a ReFs or XFS formatted disk repository the space consumption is not much higher, because the synthetic full utilize the block cloning feature.
• The retention for the daily and weekly backups is the same - one month? Did I understand this correct?

Based on the assumption above, I would create the backup-to-tape job and the tape media pool this way:

• You can then set the daily job as source for the backup-to-tape job and activate the option “As new backup files appear” on the schedule tab, if you are not sure when your backup-to-disk job finishes. If you know when it finishes, than you can schedule the tape job at a time when it if sure that the disk job is ready.
• In the tape media pool (a normal media pool is enough, no GFS pool is needed) you can start a new media set weekly when the synthetic full was created by the backup-to-disk job. Use the “Daily at” schedule with the “On these days” option and select the appropriate day. So the backups are written to the same media set the whole week and a new one is started once a week.
• Set the retention of the media pool to 4 weeks or to be sure to 5 weeks, depending if you have the amount of tapes for this. I prefer to keep one week more than I need to have the requested amount of complete chains plus the one that is created now.

Hii,
- Due to the limited disk repository capacity, synthetic full is not an option that we can use
- Yes, Retention for daily and weekly policy is one month

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If your jobs run within the window I think this is a good way to go. I have many servers that are 30TB and above which would run over 24 hours causing me issue where the incremental would fail following a full.