VEEAM Tape job Setup

[_techie_]

Hi,

 

We currently have Backup Exec 2012 running to Tape for full backups, incremental to disk.

 

I have VEEAM installed, (just waiting on license now!) and have setup some jobs on some small test storage area. All jobs setup as reverse incremental to save space, and make restore points easy to manage. All working well!

My plan is go down the following route (just waiting on about 10TB of storage to arrive).

 

All backups to disk first (to make restore quick and simple for requests) then backup to tape.

 

My question!

 

How are other people setting up their backups to tape, and are you using forward incremental with scheduled full backups in VEEAM?

With my increased storage, I think this should all be possible. I.E. how many restore points are you running for servers and when do you run your fulls to tape. What about tape rotations etc?

 

Any pointers would be cool!

 

Cheers

_techie_

[Tall_Paul]

I've just set this up.

 

IIRC they don't recommend reverse incremental if you're backing up to tape, just if you're backing up to another disk (like a USB 3 drive for example).

 

VEEAM tape backup is a bit different in that there are no monthly backups, so you'll have to manage that yourself, but it works very well and is pretty easy.

 

We do a full backup on Friday\Saturday and incrementals Monday-Thursday. The tape jobs are set to run straight after the backup to disk jobs.

 

The only problem I've found is a couple of times the tape job hasn't picked up the backup job (it says no data present or something similar). However, running the job the following morning is fine (and maybe it's a bug that SP2 addresses).

 

Overall though I'm very happy. Backup Exec has now been kicked into touch!

[_techie_]

Hi,

 

Thanks for the info, I know they recommend that you use forward incremental to tape, however, I was thinking about backing up the entire repository to tape, rather than just one job or jobs.... Hence sticking with incremental. I only really want to restore from tape in terms of complete loss of servers and disk backup repository.

How are your tapes setup? Do you have one media pool for incremental jobs, and one for full backups? Do you have a set of tapes that you use fore sch week (week 1, week 2, week 3, month Nov 2013....)?

What retention have you got on disc in in terms of rollback points to disc?

 

Sounds like you have a similar setup with what I want to achieve :-)

[penfold]

Just to bump this thread as I'm currently setting up my Veeam Tape jobs and I'm not sure I fully got my head around it. What I want is a Incremental Daily and a Full Weekly/Monthly Tape set. My understanding is Veeam will do the full tape job using the .vbk file, the incrementals are done with the .vib files.

 

In order to get tapes set up with Daily, Weekly 1/2/3/4, Monthly Jan/Feb...etc how do I configure the Tape jobs? I have created 2 media sets - Daily & Weekly with the job to run every day. The job now puts the incremental files as created daily onto the daily tapes and only the weekly file onto the Weekly media set. But what happens when I change the tape?

 

For Example - if I run my jobs on Week 1

 

• Run my full Veeam Backup on a Friday then the corresponding Tape job on a Saturday the full file will be on Week1 tape.
  
• Swap the Week1 tapes for Week2 on Tuesday
  
• When the job now re-runs on Wednesday-Friday does it perform the daily incremental & skip the Full Backup because it knows it has already been backed up to the previous tape?
  
• Full Veeam Job runs on Friday then the corresponding Tape job on a Saturday the full file will be on Week2 tape
  

 

I'm just trying to work out how to tidy out backup tape schedule as we are moving from Symantic onto Veeam and as I inheritted the original system I'm also trying to tidy the jobs up.

[Tall_Paul]

Just to bump this thread as I'm currently setting up my Veeam Tape jobs and I'm not sure I fully got my head around it. What I want is a Incremental Daily and a Full Weekly/Monthly Tape set. My understanding is Veeam will do the full tape job using the .vbk file, the incrementals are done with the .vib files.

 

In order to get tapes set up with Daily, Weekly 1/2/3/4, Monthly Jan/Feb...etc how do I configure the Tape jobs? I have created 2 media sets - Daily & Weekly with the job to run every day. The job now puts the incremental files as created daily onto the daily tapes and only the weekly file onto the Weekly media set. But what happens when I change the tape?

 

For Example - if I run my jobs on Week 1

 

• Run my full Veeam Backup on a Friday then the corresponding Tape job on a Saturday the full file will be on Week1 tape.
  
• Swap the Week1 tapes for Week2 on Tuesday
  
• When the job now re-runs on Wednesday-Friday does it perform the daily incremental & skip the Full Backup because it knows it has already been backed up to the previous tape?
  
• Full Veeam Job runs on Friday then the corresponding Tape job on a Saturday the full file will be on Week2 tape
  

 

I'm just trying to work out how to tidy out backup tape schedule as we are moving from Symantic onto Veeam and as I inheritted the original system I'm also trying to tidy the jobs up.

 

I've got mine set up almost identically to how yours is.

 

What you have to do when you change your tapes on is insert new ones and move them to the 'Free' media pool (you can right click on them in the GUI and select 'Move to Media Pool').

 

VEEAM will do exactly what you have said (and works very well).

[penfold]

@Tall_Paul thanks there is just 1 more thing I need to do now....How do setup a Monthly job so that it overrides the weekly?

So that my job runs Week1,Week2,Week3,Monthly

 

The way I can see is that I can have the Daily Job that runs & performs the incremental then the Weekly when it detects a new full backup file giving me my Week1,Week2,Week3.

But to get a Monthly tape do I set a new Monthly job configured to run on the last Saturday of the Monthly but will this run in addition to the above job?

Edited February 7, 2014 by penfold

[Tall_Paul]

@Tall_Paul thanks there is just 1 more thing I need to do now....How do setup a Monthly job so that it overrides the weekly?

 

I'm not sure if you can (though I'll be interested to know if anyone else does it)? I just use the last weekly as a monthly.

[penfold]

I know you can configure the job to run Monthly but I can't see how you can run a Weekly OR Monthly depending on the date. Unless I'm missing something the only way to do it would be to have 2 jobs as I want to have a Monthly Media Set with a different over write protection on?

[penfold]

OK, I've just discovered a slight snag in so much that I've come in after the 2nd weekend of backups to find they have all failed with an error of no media available. I have narrowed this down to the way I have my Media Pools set. I set it to "do not create, continue using existing set.." thinking it would continue to use the same media set but a new tape if it was not available. I have since read that it is looking for the last tape to be written to and as it can't find it (I've removed it for week 1) the job fails.

 

I just want to check what I was going to do as I don't want the jobs to fail again. I was going to change the setting to daily at XXX but specify the job to run on a specific day (say Friday) before the weekly jobs will run. Will this allow me to change the tapes any time from Monday - Friday and then when the weekly job runs create a new Weekly media set for the next weekend?

 

I'm not exactly sure I understand what the option "Create a new media set for every backup session" will do as I have the job setup to run daily incrementals and weekly fulls to 2 different media sets so would that create a new Weekly media set when the job recognizes a new Full backup file?