Need help doing tape restore

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

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 ….