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OK, so this will be a bit odd. I have a Windows cluster set up as a file server. It’s a bit on the large size (11 TB - yes, TB :-)). Here’s what I want to do. We backup data to  NAS (Dell Data Domain). Then we also copy to tape and send off site. So here’s what I want to do with this huge job.

I want to backup to NAS incrementally every day, and a FULL backup on weekend (either Fri night or Sat, either is fine). The problem is .. I am currently limited on the number of tape drives (LTO 7 drives). And so what I want to do is:

copy to tape the incremental daily, but only write the FULL on Thu (Thu is the day when I have the lightest load of jobs writing to tape). And I don’t see a way to do that.

I see ADVANCD options on Tape jobs for “Process latest full backup only”. But what I want to do is to write out the FULL back on Thu, even though it was created 5 days earlier, and without any incrementals made since the full (i.e., no “chain”).

Meanwhile, I *also* want the daily incrementals to be written to tape. (They don’t have to be in the same job, I suppose).

Is there a way to do that? Have a TAPE job that only executes on Thu, and ONLY writes out the latest FULL (without any incrementals that might have been made after the FULL)? While also writing out ONLY the incrementals and not the FULL, on other days? That seems like multiple jobs, but I can’t see a way to specify only FULL or only INCREMENTAL without FULL.

Any guidance?

Based on the documentation is seems like you can do the Full backups in a job without the Incrementals but not for the reverse - Creating Backup to Tape Jobs - User Guide for VMware vSphere

Note steps 4 & 5 - step 4 is the media pool for Full backups and step 5 is a checkbox to process Incrementals and the media pool.

I think you may need to reach out to Support on this one to see if they have a way around it or the other tape experts here might have some ideas.  I deal with tape jobs (Tenant to Tape) but we process fulls.

Hmmm. Yes, at the moment, these are VMware VMs. However, soon we’ll be migrating off VMware and onto Nutanix AHV. However, the options for the tape jobs would stay the same - because my tape jobs utilize a backup *job* as their source.

We don’t use GFS (I’ve never used a GFS in over 30 years of doing backups - we always did differntial/incremental daily, and FULLs weekly. And stored EOM and EOY offsite with multi-year retention, and daily/weekly overwritten within 2 months).

“If the source job produces a forever incremental backup chain or is a backup copy job without GFS option enabled, Veeam Backup & Replication will periodically create a virtual full backup. You can configure the full backup schedule at this step of the wizard. The virtual full cannot be switched off; however, it is disabled automatically if the source job periodically creates active full or synthetic full backups.”

I always specify an ACTIVE FULL, personally. 

Well, this is a start, anyway. Right now, this backup is on an old EMC Networker system, until we migrate. And over there, the incremental always work, but the FULLs end up failing. So theoretically I could continue and only do incremental there, and FULLs on Veeam. It’s weird and stupid, but would get me through, I think. I’ll think about it. And open a support ticket, too.

Thanks!

Hmm..yeah...not sure on this as well. Will a Vitual Full work for you ​@MikeLeone ?

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/virtual_full_backup_hiw.html?ver=120

Hmmm. Yes, at the moment, these are VMware VMs. However, soon we’ll be migrating off VMware and onto Nutanix AHV. However, the options for the tape jobs would stay the same - because my tape jobs utilize a backup *job* as their source.

We don’t use GFS (I’ve never used a GFS in over 30 years of doing backups - we always did differntial/incremental daily, and FULLs weekly. And stored EOM and EOY offsite with multi-year retention, and daily/weekly overwritten within 2 months).

“If the source job produces a forever incremental backup chain or is a backup copy job without GFS option enabled, Veeam Backup & Replication will periodically create a virtual full backup. You can configure the full backup schedule at this step of the wizard. The virtual full cannot be switched off; however, it is disabled automatically if the source job periodically creates active full or synthetic full backups.”

I always specify an ACTIVE FULL, personally. 

Well, this is a start, anyway. Right now, this backup is on an old EMC Networker system, until we migrate. And over there, the incremental always work, but the FULLs end up failing. So theoretically I could continue and only do incremental there, and FULLs on Veeam. It’s weird and stupid, but would get me through, I think. I’ll think about it. And open a support ticket, too.

Thanks!

Sounds good.  I am interested to see what support says about this.

At a previous job, I had a local IT admin who required a Full backup on tape every day. As this is not configurable within the GUI, we had a workaround put in place to run a powershell script every day at a set time which would initiate a full backup using the “Sync-VBRBackupToTapeJob” command:

Sync-VBRBackupToTapeJob -Job <VBRBackupToTapeJob> -Weekly e-Wait]  i<CommonParameters>]

This command only works with GFS enabled pools. We just treated the above “Weekly” media pool as a daily media pool, since we left the job disabled and that way it wouldn’t do a daily incremental.

Perhaps something similar would be a workable solution for your Weekly Full requirement on Thursdays.

Well that’s a pretty slick workaround Tommy! Cool share!

Very nice Tommy, wasn’t aware of that. Maybe also an option for our small customers who want a daily full to tape. Thank you. 

​@MikeLeone, I would go with GFS media pools if this is your requirement:

 

copy to tape the incremental daily, but only write the FULL on Thu (Thu is the day when I have the lightest load of jobs writing to tape). And I don’t see a way to do that.

 

In this scenario, your Full backup on Thursday would go to the Weekly Media Set, then you would simply enable the Daily media set: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/creating_gfs_media_pools.html?ver=120

So on Thursday, it will check the added source jobs -- if the most recent suitable restore point is a Full backup, it will be copied to tape. If the most recent suitable restore point is an incremental, it will produce a Virtual Full backup directly on tape.

For the other days, the increments will be archived to the Daily Media Set as desired.

 

I did notice however you have an aversion to Synthetic/Virtual fulls it seems -- not a criticism, your experience should guide your decision here and I’m guessing you have either regulatory requirements or bad experiences with the Synthetic/Virtual full process previously to lead to this position, or perhaps just prefer to know the backup was created purely from the production data; doesn’t matter, all understandable reasons.

It is worth noting however that Virtual Fulls are currently the fastest and most reliable way to put a full backup on tape. Because Virtual Fulls work asynchronously as they read data from the backup chain, the bottleneck tends to be more the tape drives rather than reading from source due to the async reads; while I can understand bad past experiences, the Virtual Full engine got a major overhaul in VBR v10 and it’s worked pretty stellar both in terms of performance and reliability since that time. Give it a shot is what I’m saying if past poor experiences were the reason.

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