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 Object Storage Backup, File 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 retry 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.
• The file backup to tape functionality does not support backup from storage snapshots for NFS file shares.
• The file backup to tape job does not back up the DFS configuration. It can read and protect the content stored within the DFS server structure.
• You can back up only files and directories whose names are written in all locales in the UTF-8 encoding. If the encoding is other than UTF-8, you can back up only files and directories whose names are written in the English locale.
• If a file to tape 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 processes large quantities of files, you must provide additional system resources apart from those listed in system requirements for the backup server/database server and tape server.

Backup Server

Database Server

For storing the configuration database, we recommend using a dedicated NVME drive that is not used for anything else. The recommended RAM size is the same as for the backup server. If the database server and the backup server are the same server, double the RAM. 8 CPU cores is the recommended minimum for the database server. The database space required for processing 1 000 000 files and folders is 850 MB.