Best posts made by Donahue

I just did it. The guide still applies, apart from getting 15 and not 13.

About a year ago I had this thread discussing starting to use tape for backups. Well, it never got implemented and now I am just getting around to being able to make this work. However, I am running into issues that didn't come up in our planning and I think I need to modify the plan and or scrap it and come up with something else.

Right now I have a Veeam inside a 2012R2 VM running on Hyper-V 2019. My tape drive is connected via SAS to the host. I am trying to get Veeam to talk to the tape drive but I ran into a glaring problem. I cannot seem pass through a tape drive to my VM. Am I right about this? I can't pass through the entire SAS controller, it would have had to been the drive itself.

I see two options moving forward.

1. Run Veeam physically and not inside a VM
2. scrap the idea of tape and convince my management to consider cloud options.

Thoughts? I am in the process of completely reevaluating how we are setup and what exactly we would do if we encountered issues that required us to need these backups.

we probably have about 8-10 TB of real data, and I want to be able to store EVERYTHING on the tapes. I have two online backup copies in two locations, so this is my third and offline copy. The main backups are to disk, and so the tape is just backing up the disk and I think there is going to be less of an issue with transfer rates. The host that has the veeam VM has no other VM's on it currently, it's only running this one instance. That's one reason just going bare metal on it makes some sense.

My plan right now is to run the backup every week and have like 5 tapes in rotation, one onsite and 4 at the bank. My disk backups should account for any archiving we need, tapes are really more for DR that for casual restores.