Shared repo between VB for M365 and VBR

No you cannot share repos between VB365 and VBR as the file formats are different and it is not a best practice.  You need separate repos and for VB365 I recommend Object Storage for sure and you can do the same with VBR too depending on your architecture.

This is a really bad idea. You’ll be limited to working with JET which is inferior to object storage for backup (worse compression ratio, doesn’t scale nicely for starters). And when you need to restore some data from tape, even an individual item, you’ll need to restore the entire backup or a giant JetDB file at a minimum to extract the item you need.

What is the specific regulatory requirement enforcing tape here? Would immutable object storage, even hosted locally, not better suffice?

JET is horrible to work with. If you’ve ever had to use ESEUTIL you already know. 10/10 don’t recommend. 

We also see the requirement to push the VB365 backups to tape a lot here in GER. Some companies and also some governmental institutions have this in their regulation. Also tape is still a valid option nowadays once it comes to reliability:

Modern LTO tape is roughly 10,000 times more reliable than an enterprise SATA hard drive and 1,000 times more reliable than a high-end enterprise SAS drive. And flash isn't any better than SAS in the numbers.

If you're using glacier or archive tier in AWS or Azure respectively, you're actually using tape.

Unfortunately, to my knowledge there is no supported and also no feasible option to push VB365 backups to tape. One might think of using unstructured data backup to backup the S3 bucket with your VB365 backups to disk and then to tape. But this is also explicitly not supported. As being said, jet is not an option and will soon be gone anyways.

But the feature request for VB365 to tape has been there for a long time now (e.g. in RD forum). But with VDC gaining a lot more attention, I’d not assume this to be of any priority right now.

Hi @angy.evt 
As already mentioned the preferred storage technology for Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 is Object Storage. Why ? We have better performance and disk space usage.

• When using Object Storage as the backup target, Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 can create a copy of the backups in a secondary Object Storage location.

• Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 can leverage the Immutability functionality of the Object Storage platform, ensuring an immutable backup.

• The secondary backup copy can also utilize cost-effective storage classes such as Azure Blob Storage Archive access tier, Amazon S3 Glacier storage class, or Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage class.

In case you have to use Disk Repository, your repository must be a Windows Server !  I recommend to create a dedicated partition for the M365 data. I don’t know how many object you have to protect but VBM365 need a lot of ressources. 

You could protect the backup server using Veeam Backup & Replication. The configuration (ConfigDB) and Proxy (ProxyDb) folder on the Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 Server and Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 Proxy installations are very important. In the past, I deployed an Agent on the repository and backed up only the dedicated partition hosting the M365 data. The backup was then copied to tape for long-term retention.

Veeam Backup & Replication leverages the VSS integration of Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 to ensure application-consistent backups of the VB365 data. In addition, Veeam Backup & Replication automatically recognizes the dataset, allowing you to directly restore individual items from the image-based backups using the native Veeam Explorers — without the need for any additional tools.

In addition, be aware that Microsoft has recently restricted access to the Graph API using several levels of throughput limiting. These limits affect all backup solutions based on the Microsoft Graph API, which naturally aim to achieve maximum backup throughput.