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I’m backing up about 30TB of data in my homelab to LTO tape using Veeam 11 CE. Looking at the licensing if I upgrade to Veeam 12 CE then I will be restricted to 5TB of backup, and my jobs will fail. Am I understanding this correctly?

Thanks

Derek

That sounds correct ​@Mugwanya  ; from the Veeam Edition Feature Comparison Guide (pg 8) they detail your 1st 500GB is free, then 500GB per instance, and you get 10 instances in CE. So, theoretically...5.5TB I guess.

Best.

Thanks. What confused me were posts like this: https://community.veeam.com/topic/show?tid=6204&fid=66 where they say they are backing up 36TB to tape use CE.

Ah, ok; so..what that person in that Post is using is a File to Tape Job. If you skim a few pages down to pg. 12 in the Comparison Guide I shared, you’ll see CE only supports File to Tape Jobs, not Backup to Tape. So, you can probably send all your data to tape in a “file to tape” Job I think. If you have a virtual machine you can install CE v12 on, you can create a test job and find out pretty quickly/easily. No TB size limitation was stated in the Comparison Guide so worth testing.

CE has 10 free instances. Since version 12, for each 500GB Source data 1 instance is required.  

5TB (in theory approximately 5.4999TB) is the limit for File Backup Jobs or File to Tape Jobs with community edition. But only if you don‘t protect other workloads. Other workloads will also consume instances and therefore lower the amount of files you can backup.

 

Protecting Veeam Backup files (such as vbk or vib) with a File to Tape job will not count towards the 500GB license usage. The full list of „free“ filetypes is in the help center.

 

Best,

Fabian

 

 

 

 

Really interesting, I hadn’t seen that link before. So if I can split my 32TB of files into 65 499GB backups, then with Veeam 12 it would take 0 licenses. Or I could backup the server to disk as a .vbk file and then backup that .vbk. But as one big backup direct to tape it would require 130 licenses! I’ll be sticking with Veeam 11.

As explained in my previous comment, writing VBK files to tape is “free” and doesn’t consume licenses.

The primary backup backup job (to vbk/vib) will already consume 1 license per machine, which is why we don’t ask for a second license during the File to Tape job of Veeam backup files.

 

Best,

Fabian

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