Manage tape

Hi Damien,
not completely sure If I got your question correct.

You are asking what names we are using for our tapes?

The LTO names are quite straightforward, first 6 dcharacters for free use and the last two characters for the LTO generation.

Our names depend on the the customer and environment. We are using either one character for the location of the library and 5 digits for the tape number - in this case it is a multi customer environment in most cases.

For smaller customers we are using three characters for a abbreviation of the customer name an three digits for the tape number.

I hope this is what you were asking… 😁

This will all be dependent on what you want to do for labelling as it is subjective and there are many options.  Just need to pick what is necessary for your needs.

By default for GFS Media Pool Veeam will name the tapes in below format.

Daily media set #%id% %date%

Weekly media set #%id% %date%

Monthly media set #%id% %date%

Quarterly media set #%id% %date%

Yearly media set #%id% %date%

You can set a custom name of your choice in Advanced settings.

By default for GFS Media Pool Veeam will name the tapes in below format.

 

Daily media set #%id% %date%

Weekly media set #%id% %date%

Monthly media set #%id% %date%

Quarterly media set #%id% %date%

Yearly media set #%id% %date%

 

You can set a custom name of your choice in Advanced settings.

 

 

This are the media set names, not the tape names….

@JMeixner 

Thanks for the info. Maybe I misunderstood the question. Not sure if the question asked is related to Hardware vendor barcode labelling or Veeam Media set naming conventions.

Hello @liyakat_versatile ,
yes, @damien commenge will have to tell us what he really means. 😎

Hello :)

@JMeixner @liyakat_versatile @Chris.Childerhose 

Thanks for all of these answer.

I have several customers asking me how can I manage tape, label them (vendor name = bar code and not media set), when do I need to put them out of the library, What do I need to do when I need to restore one because with “default” name it’s not easy to sort them and find quickly which one is needed for monthly, weekly, … 

So, my question is more about “best practice” or use case on tape management “governance” and your usage. I know there is several solution, I just would like you to give me the mains one :)

I don’t provide tape to my customer. Each one get their tape and manage them. 

If you can give me some advices about it thank you all :)

Mhh, you don’t have that much choice for tape labels. You can freely define the first six characters of the tape label, that’s it.

And… as far as I know you cannot assign tapes from different pools (with different labels) to daily, weekly, monthly or yearly backups in a GFS pool. It just takes one from the pool or the free pool.

You have to record the usage of the tape prior to export. For this the media set names are good…

And Veeam “knows” which tapes are needed for a restore of a specific restore point and will tell you which offsite tapes have to be checked in.

@JMeixner 

Yes, I totally agree with you about it. 

I did some installation but never have customer asking for governance about it ^^ .

For me, when they execute a restore task, Veeam will say you need tape 000001 + 000002, and the customer needs to put them inside the library. If my customer want to find it fast, because he has 50 tape (let’s imagine it) on his vault, what would you recommand ? 

Thanks

@JMeixner 

It’s ok for me to say them just need to sort them by number :) 

I don’t remember but I think tape are only number by default so it should be ok :)

When you’re talking about a big tape library/robot, I think you’re going to be pretty reliant on the automation side of things.  If you were changing out tapes manually, then you can do things like labeling them by Daily/Weekly/Monthly/Yearly, etc.  For instance, I have a client that just does monthly to tape, so each tape is named for the month the backup is taken in.  Back in my previous life before Veeam, we had tapes named in a rotating fashion.

• Monday 1
• Tuesday 1
• Wednesday 1
• Thursday 1
• Monday 2
• Tuesday 2
• Wednesday 2
• Thursday 2
• Friday 1
• Friday 2
• Friday 3
• Friday 4
• Monthly 1
• Monthly 2
• Monthly 3
• Monthly 4
• Monthly 5
• Monthly 6
• Yearly

Or something like that.  Monday-Thursday was a 2 week rotation, Friday’s were monthly rotations, Monthly's were good for 6 months (as I recall, this was over 12 years ago), and there was a yearly.  But that works okay in a manual process.  If you’re using a robot/library, you’re pretty much going to be beholden to the tape serial number AFAIK.

Sorry for the delay.

Thanks both for your answer :)

Here are a few things you need to decide before you start a naming convention for your tapes.

What is your expected growth, size, and amount of tapes you plan on having? 

Are there multiple sites or environments you will be using tape in, or for?

The name will be 8 characters, with the last 2 being the generation of tape. (L8 would be for LTO8)

This leaves you a total of 6. I always plan to have a bit more growth than expected. 

If you have multiple sites or libraries, having a prefix is quite handy, so using the first 2 characters as HQ and DR or something like that would leave the next 4 characters for tapes allowing 9999 tapes per site or library roughly. 

HQ0001L8 - HQ9999L8 and DR0001L8 - DR9999L8 

Lets say you had 8 Tape libraries, you could call them L1 - L8 and have 9999 tapes in each.

You could use the first character for each library LIB1 would be 1000001L8 - 199999L8 allowing 99999 tapes per library.     

They key is to have UNIQUE tapes.   If they ever get exported and moved in an emergency, you really want to know where they came from.   

@Scott 

There is 2 library but they are “small”.

Arround 30 tapes in each one and only 1 is needed for daily backup to tape.

Thanks for the answer, it can help to have a better idea of how to do. 

With multiple robots I have to go by site as I don’t want them to get mixed up.. at that point, because there are 100’s of tapes, I want to keep it sequential as the next time I order another 100 tapes or so I wonder, what range is still available.    Veeam keeps tracks of the dates, restore points and policies. If I export some tapes, Veeam can track that too, but it’s always best to keep the set together.

I do wish I could have had a naming convention like that on my tapes though :) seems very logical to read.    My retention policy being forever, means I will continue this way, until LTO10 when I assume I’ll switch and migrate it all over…. but there is some talk of cloud recently which might get rid of SOME of my tape, but not all. 

Yes, this would be illogical when when it comes to managing hundreds or thousands of tapes with a robot etc.  This was in the case of a single, standalone tape drive where the tapes were changed manually.