Before You Begin

Before you configure a file to tape job, consider the following:

• The file backup to tape functionality consumes Veeam instance licenses. However, if you upgrade to Veeam Backup & Replication 12 from the previous versions, you will have a grace period of 3 months during which your file to tape jobs will not consume license instances. For more information, see Instance Consumption for NAS Backup and File to Tape Jobs.

Note that the NDMP servers backup to tape functionality does not consume Veeam instance licenses.

• You must configure one or more regular media pools with the necessary media set and retention settings.
• You must load tapes to the tape device and configure the target media pool so that it has access to them. If the media pool has no available tape, the tape job will wait for 72 hours and then terminate.
• Make sure that files and folders that you want to back up do not contain certain Unicode symbols, including but not limited to the symbols with the following codes: U+D800 – U+DFFF, U+FFFE, U+FFFF (55296 – 57343, 65534, 65535), U+007C (124). Also the file and folder names must contain only symbols that are supported by the source file system. Files and folders with unsupported names will be skipped from processing.
• Make sure that files and folders that you want to back up are not symlinks. Backup of symlinks is not supported.
• For SMB and NFS file share backup to tapes, make sure that the shared source does not contain folders with the same name entered in different letter case (for example, Documents and documents).
• To back up NDMP volumes, add a storage device that supports the NDMP protocol as an NDMP server. For more information, see Adding NDMP Servers.

Note that if a job is unable to complete within 21 days period, it will be stopped with the 'Failed' status.

System Requirements for Large Number of Files in Job

If the file to tape job will process large quantities of files, for example, more than 1 000 000 files in 1 000 folders, you must provide the following system resources:

• Backup server: 1.5 GB RAM per each 1 000 000 files
• Tape server: 800 MB RAM per each 1 000 000 files.

You must provide these resources in addition to general system requirements. For more information, see System Requirements.