Veeam - File restores - What am i doing wrong?

[mrbios]

I run a weekly files to tape backup job of our entire data, each week totalling about 4.8TB and every week it all seems to go well. However when i do a test restore it pops up and tells me "the following tapes will be needed" highlighting tapes from two other sets......why is this? If I'm doing a full backup of the data as it is one week, and selecting that backup set to restore from, then why would it want me to get a tape from a different set to complete the restore if that tape had nothing to do with that backup set? What am i doing wrong?

 

Basically i want each weekly backup set to be capable of doing a full restore if needed without needing tapes from other sets and i can't currently do that.

[zag]

Tapes!! how very 1990's of you

 

Why not just use a NAS and do away with the need for a complicated tape setup? This is what we do and file restores work as they should and are instant.

[mrbios]

Tapes!! how very 1990's of you

 

Why not just use a NAS and do away with the need for a complicated tape setup? This is what we do and file restores work as they should and are instant.

 

In the age of ransomware I'll only be fully content with a solution that has the data offline and in a fireproof safe

 

We actually do have the data in a second building on an old SAN, but i don't feel like things are fully covered with just that scenario.

[Katy]

Are you definitely doing a full backup each time and not something like incremental, where it will need old tapes if the files haven't changed recently?

I don't use Veeam to back up directly to tape though (we backup VMs to disk with Veeam, then the veeam backup gets put onto tape by Backup Exec - when we set it up veeam didn't do tape)

[mrbios]

Are you definitely doing a full backup each time and not something like incremental, where it will need old tapes if the files haven't changed recently?

I don't use Veeam to back up directly to tape though (we backup VMs to disk with Veeam, then the veeam backup gets put onto tape by Backup Exec - when we set it up veeam didn't do tape)

 

I've got incremental turned off, and full backup set to run every Friday from 23:00. This then runs each weekend, completes by the Sunday morning with no complaints from Veeam at all.

[FragglePete]

If I remember correctly, you can't do an individual file restore from tape using Veeam - just the whole VM. I know it's something that a lot of peeps on the Veeam Forums have requested. Bit of a surprise that was after moving away from Backup Exec.

 

The way to do it is to backup locally to a hard disk, NAS, etc then do a copy job to tape once each job has finished. That's how we've been doing it. We back up to internal HDD first, copy that to Tape and then do another copy to a NAS unit which is located in another building on site. We can instantly recover individual files from either online copy. I tested the tape restore a few months ago (part of our DR test), here it's recommended to recover the VM from tape to a temporary repository and then restore it from that. Long winded, but yes, I like offline tape too - using LTO-5 with a 8 tape library.

 

Pete

[mrbios]

In case anyone is interested i got an answer back about this on reddit...apparently it's due to the way veeams cataloging works at the moment.

 

I was told:

Basically a folder in the catalog will contain all the files that were saved and currently can be found on tapes. So if you restore a folder from catalog you are not restoring from the latest tape - you are restoring all the files in that folder on all tapes."

 

Which is a bit annoying, but i was also given this little quick fix:

if you want to restore from a particular tape only there is a workaround. Just create a new database (go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication\SqlDatabase, change the value to anything and restart backup service), add tape server and catalog the necessary tape. You can go back to normal db any time.