Hello. I have a request to restore files from a specific host from a tape made earlier this year (2025-01-01). And I am not sure how to determine which tape it is that I need. Here’s the problem. At the time, the VM I need files from was running on vSphere. Since then, we’ve moved to Nutanix. If I try and do a Restore, choose VMware, I don’t see the jobs from that long ago. (which I kinda expected). But what I don’t know, is how to determine which tape made on (or around) 2025-01-01 has the backups from this VM. So I can recall the tape from offsite storage and do the restore.
I realize this is probably a silly question, but I’ve never had to do a restore from so far back, it’s only on tape, and not still on disk storage.
I tried to do a Restore, If I select “Files and folders”, I can scroll down to my server, and I can see the VM I want, but the backups listed only go back about 60 days. I need longer than that. Which means I’m looking in the wrong area. But I don’t know what the right area would be ….
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If you check the tapes in the media pool for the customer and then the properties of the tape you can see which restore points are on the tapes then recall the one you need. See the bottom of this page - Viewing Files and Objects on Tape - User Guide for VMware vSphere
If you perform the tape restore from the tape restore wizard and specify the file and restore point, it should allow you to start the restore session without specifying which tape.
When the restore job starts, it will say in the session log which tapes it is waiting for.
It could be that the tape job is configured to overwrite media after a certain time, so it’s worth checking that. It’s also worth verifying if the tape actually received the tape-out on the required date. If it doesn’t show up in the Veeam console, the best approach would be to take the tapes out of the library and run an inventory followed by a catalog to re-import the metadata. Another possibility is that Veeam was reinstalled at some point without restoring the configuration backup, since that’s where the tape catalogs are stored. In that case, only cataloging the media directly would make the restore points show up again.
Some progress! I went to the media pool, sorted by date, looked for tapes approx 250 days old (2025-01-01 was 259 days ago), and looked at the properties to see if the job was on there.
(Back then, this job was in 1 generic pool, since then, I’ve made pools more categorized - i.e., “Production scanning”, “Dev database”, etc).
I found the tape from 254 days ago, shows the job with that VM with a date of 2024-12-31. The next oldest tape is taking forever to fill in values of what’s on the tape, but at least I have an idea of what tape(s) I might need. Be a lot more help if the “Last written” column was an actual date, not “255 days ago”, but I’ll manage, I guess. LOL
It could be that the tape job is configured to overwrite media after a certain time, so it’s worth checking that. It’s also worth verifying if the tape actually received the tape-out on the required date. If it doesn’t show up in the Veeam console, the best approach would be to take the tapes out of the library and run an inventory followed by a catalog to re-import the metadata. Another possibility is that Veeam was reinstalled at some point without restoring the configuration backup, since that’s where the tape catalogs are stored. In that case, only cataloging the media directly would make the restore points show up again.
Actually not. We don’t overwrite tape, due to a legal restriction. I do remember having to re-install Veeam at some point, but I definitely restored the configuration. And I believe that was before the time this tape would have been made. Unfortunately, I don’t have the notes on when that happened (I’m lucky I remember yesterday, at this point LOL).
As noted above, looking at the properties of tapes made around that time. However, I got a time out when trying to expand one of the tapes. Regardless, at least now I know I can recall all the tapes with a “Last Written” time frame around when I need, and I can load’em all up, and then figure out which one to do the restore from. (I think)
Side question. When I try and list the files on tape, it takes so long that it times out. Is there a way to use the Powershell cmdlets to retrieve the list of files on a tape? My thinking is that it would be quicker if the list of tapes were stored in a PS object or array, then I could have PS show me the results, and I wouldn’t have to worry about VBR timing out to show the list ….
If you are doing a file to tape backup, and there are lots of file son that tape, listing files will take a VERY long time. They actually removed that for a while but enough people wanted to keep the feature they brought it back. Listing files works great when you are doing a VM backup and copying that to tape.
You’d be better to search under files, then look under tape, and select the server here. It’s much fasterer than trying to list files on the drive and guessing where they are. Find the file you want to restore,
You can drill down the folders and see how many restore points you have. when you right click restore from tape it allows you to pick the mediapool/restore point/date you want to restore from tape.
