Scenario 1: Small-scale Deployment
Infrastructure: A small-scale deployment with a tape library and limited number of tapes; tapes are not exported 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 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.
Tape job can be scheduled to run every day after the source (backup) job.
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:
We assume 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.
We highly recommend to allocate at least 50% more tapes then should be normally required to backup up the data to avoid issues