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How to setup file to tape for rotate of tapes to and from offside storage

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  • Hien
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Dear all,

Apology I am a newbie here and my question may sound naive. We appreciate any help from your guys.

We used Tivoli in the past to backup Oracle for both long term data keeping and DR. We created 3 sets of tapes. 2 sets would  be always in the tape library and one at remote site. Every 2 weeks we get back the offsite set and load it into library, and send one set of tapes to remote site for storage.

Could you please give some idea how to set up file-to-tape job (let say daily full backup of Oracle) in Veeam in similar fashion? Our idea is to create a media pool with 3 media sets. One media set online for backup for 2 weeks, another offline in the tape library and one media set in the vault (to keep in remote site). And we will rotate in that way for every 2 weeks.

Will that work? We value your input very much.

Thank you.

Hien 

Best answer by StefanZi

Hi Hien and welcome to the community.

Do you take full image backups of your Oracle servers (virtual/physical)? In this case please do not use File 2 Tape but create machine to tape jobs to directly copy the image backups.

You can then arrange your available tapes in media pools and export one of the media sets you’re using.
You can configure how long you want to protect data on the tapes until it gets overwritten.

From the GUI you can use a media set only for one week before switching to the next one.

You can also look into GFS Media Pools and use Weeklies (append data to unfinished).

You can use PowerShell however to automate everything around exporting if you like or do that manually. Also you can monitor exported tapes in vaults.

Hope that makes sense. Tape handling can be a bit of a fuss.

However, you might want to have a look on the Scale-Out Backup Repository and Capacity Tier where you can copy your backups to an object storage repository with immutability and thus you can avoid the tape handling and you can already get an off-site copy of your daily backups.

(e.g. 42 days retention, with copy to object storage from day 1, immutability for 42 days, and move to object storage after day 14 will give you 14 days of local backups for fastest restores and the rest online and immutable on the object storage).

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StefanZi
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  • July 22, 2021

Hi Hien and welcome to the community.

Do you take full image backups of your Oracle servers (virtual/physical)? In this case please do not use File 2 Tape but create machine to tape jobs to directly copy the image backups.

You can then arrange your available tapes in media pools and export one of the media sets you’re using.
You can configure how long you want to protect data on the tapes until it gets overwritten.

From the GUI you can use a media set only for one week before switching to the next one.

You can also look into GFS Media Pools and use Weeklies (append data to unfinished).

You can use PowerShell however to automate everything around exporting if you like or do that manually. Also you can monitor exported tapes in vaults.

Hope that makes sense. Tape handling can be a bit of a fuss.

However, you might want to have a look on the Scale-Out Backup Repository and Capacity Tier where you can copy your backups to an object storage repository with immutability and thus you can avoid the tape handling and you can already get an off-site copy of your daily backups.

(e.g. 42 days retention, with copy to object storage from day 1, immutability for 42 days, and move to object storage after day 14 will give you 14 days of local backups for fastest restores and the rest online and immutable on the object storage).

Kseniya
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  • July 22, 2021

Thank you very much Stefan,

We are using AIX physical box, and use Veeam file-to-tape to backup Oracle RMAN files.

In future we intent to use object storage as per your advice, but for now need to stick to physical tapes. Since we do not backup Oracle as whole VM so we have difficulty to implement GFS pools, although we already backup Oracle to disk. In this case I understand if we want to backup this backup to tape we cannot do file to disk to tape, can do only backup to tapes. And when do restore we need to restore tape to infra, cannot restore tape to AIX files

Best Regards

Hien

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I see, AIX. So are you using our AIX agent? In that case you could also put the AIX agent backups to tape (that would be still a machine to tape instead of a file to tape job).

You always can use file to tape jobs, also with VBK files, but of course there’s some intelligence lost because Veeam just knows of files on the tapes and not what they contain (machine backups in case of a VBK).

But yes, you need to go to disk first for that while with a file-2-tape you could probably read the RMAN dumps from the source itself and put them directly to tape.

So if you want to run it like that the easiest way would be to go to a weekly cycle - this is built in the GUI and easy to configure.

  1. Create a tape pool for your F2T job with a new media set once per week (e.g. 10 am sunday) and then choose to protect data for 6 weeks (so it won’t get overwritten for the next 6 weeks)
  2. Create your backup job (F2T) to this media pool. Configure a full backup, e.g. every Sunday 11pm and incrementals every other day at 11pm (or fulls on every day - depending on your file source)
  3. You could configure an automatic export after job completion to happen on Saturday (so just before a new media set is created on Sunday and the sunday backups run to the next media set). However if you want to keep two weeks “offline in the library” I think you do not want to export yet. 

So then you just have to run the export either manually or scripted every 2 weeks for the oldest two media sets and import the other vaulted back in.

Kseniya
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  • July 22, 2021

Thank you Stefan for the detailed explanation. We will do the test run.

As I understand from documentation, each media set will start with a new tape. In this case according to your suggestion in point 1 we need at least 6 tapes for 6 media sets for 6 weeks. Am I right?

Best Regards,

Hien

 

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Yes, correct that would require at least 6 tapes.

If you want to continue with 3 tapes and bi-weekly rotation, you’d need to stay with “do continue using current media set” and then use e.g. PowerShell to protect the currently used media to force the creation of a new set or re-configure the job/pool to create a new media set every two weeks.

If you run incrementals to tape that will not force a full by the way, so you’ll need to schedule a full if you require hat (or modify the job via PowerShell to run a full every two weeks just after mediaset change).

It works but it’s a little more complicated.

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  • July 22, 2021

Thanks Stefan.

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