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Working with Tape Media

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Veeam provides native support for backing up your data to tape. Tape backups is an easy and high-reliable storing scheme protecting your backups from disaster or occasional loss.

To start backing up data to tape, you need to deploy the tape backup infrastructure and configure Veeam Backup & Replication to meet your secondary destination storage policies.

To back up data to tape, you need to create a tape job that can run manually or on schedule. To restore data from tape, you need to insert the tapes containing the needed data and start the restore process that runs fully automated.

With Veeam Backup & Replication, you can perform the following operations:

Archiving VM backups to tape: the backup to tape job is specially designed to select the Veeam backup files and archive them to tape. Veeam Backup & Replication allows you to archive incremental or full backups, or both, and also to schedule a synthetic full backup that is created specially for tape archives. You can archive backups that are produced by certain backup to disk jobs, or set the tape job to monitor backup repositories and archive newly added backups. Select an appropriate data source in the tape job to enable these options.
Linking tape jobs to backup jobs: to make the VM archiving more convenient, you can link the tape job to a regular backup job. In this case, Veeam Backup & Replication will set the tape device as a secondary destination for the backup job and start the linked tape job after it. The tape job will select the newly created backup files and copy them to tape.
Archive files with user data: Veeam Backup & Replication allows you to archive any files with no limitation to file format. To archive files, you need to create a dedicated file to tape job that is able to archive full and incremental backups of user files. As a data source, you can select any Microsoft Windows server, Linux server or shared folder that is accessible by the Veeam backup server.

Restore VMs that was archived to tape into your virtual infrastructure. The restore capabilities provides all options available for regular VM restore such as choosing restore point or restoring to another location with possibility to re-configure the restored VM in the latter case.
Copy tape backups to disk and use, for example, for the following tasks:

Keep some VM backups on disk, for example, to have them at hand; you can copy backups for particular VMs or whole backup chains.
Perform guest OS files restore. Restoring VM backups to disk allows you to restore a VM in some allocated folder and perform file-level restore from its disks.

Restore files: the Files from Tape Restore wizard allows you to navigate through the tape archive selecting the files you need and restore them to original location or any other disk or folder in your backup infrastructure.

Import data from tapes that were recorded not on your Veeam backup server: when you run the importing procedure for such tapes, Veeam Backup & Replication scans the data that is written to them and adds information about them to the Veeam backup database. After that the data becomes available for restore.

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