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I'm currently trying to install a new tape backup environment (LTO 7, hardware is already set up). As LTO 7 tapes provide a LOT of data space (6/15TB per tape), and the backups that need to be stored on tape will not exceed 0.5TB per day, it would be a charm if there was a way to store more than only one (consecutive) backup set on each cassette. Target would be to have one tape per week, with daily backups on it.

When asking Google about this issue, I get lots and lots of answers on how to setup multiple tapes for one backup set - but nothing about storing multiple backup sets on one tape.

Environment is Windows 10 tower PC with external LTO 7 streamer device. Backups get there via FTP batch script over night. I started testing with Iperius Backup, as they were recommended a lot because of their price/functionality ratio. Sadly, Iperius can only handle one backup set per tape.

Therefore, I'm on the look for another tape backup software that's capable of the backup plan I described here. As I wrote earlier, Google did not provide a software solution for this issue, so now I'm putting my hope in the community here.

Thanks a lot in advance! - Daniel

Daniel
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    You are aware that this is a BAD idea and you are not gaining as much as you think because you ahve to replace tapes way more often? But generally you loose daily backup redundancy. Unless this is throw away data, I would consider this approach one for HR - termination. If your backup is that tiny, possibly something not tapes based (cloud) is a much better solution. But with your approach you sabotage a very critical fallback step o f backups any in the worst case loose a week of data, not a day. – TomTom Mar 28 '20 at 23:03

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Check Veeam Backup and Replication. In v9.5 they allow to append incomplete tapes. https://helpcenter.veeam.com/archive/backup/95/vsphere/add_gfs_media_pool_advanced.html

The community edition is free for a use of 10 or fewer VMs. Haven't yet upgraded to their new v10.

A.Newgate
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Bacula and Bareos does this well. They are able to write to the tape until it is full, then they ask for another tape. AFAIK they are Linux only, except that they do have a Windows client agent for backing up Windows pc-s, but the central server(s) must run Linux.

However, according to my experience these are complex and somewhat fragile softwares. Considering that you already have the data to backup on one machine via ftp, first I would just try a shell script from a cron job which append one or more tar files to the tape and email you every week to change the tape.

Hontvári Levente
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  • First, thank you for your answer! I'm kinda new to all this stuff (just got the job to set up the system from my boss...), so I don't really know how to do stuff with shell scripts. Do you know any tutorials or other sources on how to write on tape via script? Plus, how do I restore a backup that was created like this? – Daniel Mar 27 '20 at 10:22