What to Consider When Planning for Tape Jobs?
Before you start configuring Veeam jobs for tape archiving, consider the following factors (like listed here):
- What entities will you need to archive? Will these be files and folders, or VM backups? Do you need to archive full backups only, or both full and incremental backups?
- What is the estimated data size?
- How often will you need to archive data?
- What will be the retention policy for your data?
- How often will the tapes be changed? Will they be exported?
- What is the tape capacity? Then you can calculate how many tapes you will need.
- What tape device will be used for archiving? Some job settings will not be applicable in your case.
Deployment and Configuration Examples
Scenario 1: Small-scale deployment
Infrastructure: A small-scale deployment with a tape library and limited number of tapes; tapes are not ejected but remain in the library.
Policies: Full and incremental backups must be copied regularly to tape, creating a second copy of data. No long-term retention is required, and tapes can be overwritten as needed.
Recommended settings:
| Entity | Configuration settings |
|---|---|
| Media pool | Full and incremental backups can use the same or different media pools. |
| Media pool (retention) | Do not protect data (cyclically overwrite tape as required) |
| Media set (retention) | Do not create, always continue using current media set |
| Source (backup job) | Use forward or forever forward incremental backup method, running daily. If using forward incremental method, then have an active or synthetic full backup scheduled to run weekly. See the next section for details. |
| Tape job | Eject media upon job completion option should be enabled. Export current media set option should be disabled. |
| Scheduling | Should be configured differently for different backup methods in the source job. See below for details. |
Scheduling in case source job uses Forward Incremental
- Source job should be scheduled to run every day, with weekly with full backup creation.
- _Tape job _can be scheduled to run every day after the source (backup) job.
- To avoid copying older backup chains to tape, you can enable the Process latest full backup chain only option on the Advanced tab of the Options step of the tape job wizard. With this option selected, Veeam will copy only the last backup chain with each tape job run; otherwise, the tape job will back up all restore points that are not yet on tape.
The available tapes should be able to accommodate a complete weekly backup chain (VBK and corresponding increments), otherwise there is a risk of overwriting the necessary VBK, as at the next run the tape job will copy it once again).
Scheduling in case source job uses Forever forward incremental
- Source job should be scheduled to run every day.
- Virtual full must be scheduled to run periodically, dividing the forever incremental chain in smaller "chunks" - to avoid risk of overwriting the only VBK (as the next run the job will copy it once again).
Consider, however, that Veeam will not overwrite a tape that has been already used during the current job session. Thus, it is necessary to ensure that you always have sufficient number of tapes to accommodate all the data written in a single session.
Example:
- There are 3 tapes in the tape library.
- During the previous session, tapes #1 and #2 were filled up with archived data, and tape #3 has 50% of free space available.
Veeam will start copying data from tape #3 and then will use tape #2 and tape #1. At this point Veeam will not overwrite any data, even if the retention period is not set - the job will be hanging, waiting for a new tape.
Scenario 2: Medium to large deployment
Infrastructure: Medium to large infrastructure <<NUMBERS??>>
Policies: New tapes are loaded and used tapes are exported on a certain day of the week.
Recommended settings:
| Entity | Configuration settings |
|---|---|
| Media pool | Full and incremental backups should use different media pools. It is possible to set longer retention for full backups media pool and shorter - for incremental backups media pool, decreasing granularity for backups (e.g. 2 months for full backup media pool, 2 weeks for incremental backup media pool) |
| Media pool (retention) | Protect data for <desired period> (e.g. 7 days, 1 month, etc.) |
| Media set | Automatically create new media set daily on <day> (e.g. Monday, etc.) |
| Source job | Forward or forever forward incremental that runs daily. |
| Tape job | Eject media upon job completion option should be enabled. Export current media set.. should be enabled for the day when used tapes are extracted from library |
| Scheduling | 1. Forward incremental job running every day with weekly full backup. Tape job can be scheduled to run every day after primary backup. 2. Forever forward incremental job running every day. Virtual full must be scheduled to run periodically, dividing the forever incremental chain in smaller "chunks" to avoid risk of overwritting the only VBK (next run the job will have copy it once again). |
Scenario 3: Archiving full backups to dedicated tapes
Infrastructure: Medium to large infrastructure
Policies: Tape job has to copy only full backups to tape; every full backup should go to a new tape, after that tape is exported from the library
Recommended settings:
| Entity | Configuration Settings |
|---|---|
| Media pool | Only a media pool for full backups is needed; no media pool for incremental backup is required. |
| Media pool (retention) | Protect data for desired period (e.g. 7 days, 1 month, etc.) |
| Media set | Create a new media set for every backup session |
| Source job | Forever forward incremental method, reverse incremental or forward incremental job that is doing only periodic active fulls |
| Tape job | Eject media upon job completion option should be enabled. Export current media set.. should be enabled for the day when the job runs |
| Scheduling | 1. Forever forward incremental that runs regularly. Tape job should have processing of incremental backups disabled and virtual full set to the day when the job starts (e.g. Mon-day, Friday). At each run job will create a synthetic full on tape from the available incremental points. 2. Reverse incremental job that runs regularly. Tape job should have processing of incremental backups disabled. Every time such job runs it will copy a full backup (last point of reverse incremental chain) to the tape. 3. Forward incremental doing only active full. Tape job should have processing of incremental backups disabled and run after primary job has created a full backup. Enable option "process only latest chain" to avoid copying older backups. |
Scenario 4: Using parallel processing
Infrastructure: a library has 2 or more drives so that parallel tape processing can be used.
Other prerequisites: see the examples above
Media pool: Protect data for desired period (e.g. 7 days, 1 month etc). Since every drive creates its own media set, tape protection must be enabled to avoid accidential overwritting
Source job: any type. The tape job must use 2 or more primary jobs as a source or source job must use per-vm option and have 2 or more VMs
Other options can be set up using examples above.