Hello @sgiqhq ,
you can achieve the different backups to tape with a GFS tapepool (grandfather-father-son) as you said. The GFS mechanism takes care about which kind of backup (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly) has to be done and the retentions are set accordingly.

The monthly full backup can be configured in your Disk Backup Job at the Storage tab → Advanced and then mark the “Create active full backups periodically” and set the frequency to your need. Deactivate the “Create synthetic full backups periodically” to avoid the creation of synthetic full every week.

Edit:

See further down for the schedule settings. You have to make sure that your active full is  finished before the monthly or yearly GFS backup is started….

Thanks. Can you tell me how the tape job “knows” which backups(weekly incs/monthly fulls) to write to which part of the GFS media pool? IE when I first run the job, how does it tag that first full as a monthly job?

The defionitions about the retentions are in the GFS tapepool (here shown in the mediapool tab of my job).

The times/dates when a backup should take place is done in the archival schedule of the GFS Job.

Had to look this up in my environment, too… haven’t setup a GFS job for a long time

You create an GFS tape job when you create a “normal” tape job and select a GFS media pool. After that you can set all these options I have shown on my screenshot above on the schedule tab.

Thanks for the advice. So as I only want the incrementals on tape on a *weekly* basis I’ve set that up as a separate tape job with a normal media pool(since the GFS schedule only wants to synthesise full backups before writing to tape) archiving incrementals to tape once a week. Then, the GFS tape job puts together a full backup once a month and writes to a higher capacity GFS media pool.

Hopefully that works, and thanks again

I have just noticed your comment as below. However, my GFS backup to tape job seems to imply it will create this full backup on it’s own without an active full having been performed?

See further down for the schedule settings. You have to make sure that your active full is  finished before the monthly or yearly GFS backup is started….

As far as I know it not possible to backup your machines directly to tape. You can copy files and folders from a machine directly to tape, but no backups.

You can copy single backup jobs or repositories to tape. So, you have to create an active full with your disk backup job in order to get a full backup of your machines to tape.

It is correct that the GFS job makes a full for the monthly and yearly ( and quarterly and weekly) backups, but a full of your source backup job or repository. As you want to delete your backups on disk after they are copied to tapes, this is no problem…

The deletion has to take place outside of Veeam. I am not aware that you can delete your disk backups after copying them to tape with Veeam.

Im suprised with that “Once verified write these backups to tape and delete the files on disk - These should be written to the weekly set in a GFS media pool”

What do you want deleted your backups file on disk ?