Arcserve Backup is a full-featured, Enterprise grade backup solution used by large corporations and governments around the world. Tape Backups, although not as popular as in the past are still popular for many reasons. Chief amongst the reasons are the low cost of long term retention. An alternative to physical tape, is a Virtual Tape Library, such as StarWind VTL. StarWind VTL can present an infinite amount of retention by offering local virtual tapes with replication to numerous cloud based services such as Amazon S3/Glacier, Backblaze, Wasabi and Microsoft Azure.
Arcserve Backup integrates directly with Arcserve UDP to provide multiple ways of using tape for long term, air gapped protection of UDP Data. I have created 3 short videos demoing 3 approaches for backing up UDP data to tape. I actually use StarWind VTL which offers excellent compatibility along with the automated archive of Virtual Tapes to “Cloud” and lifecycle management (e.g. local storage to S3 to Glacier etc.).
Part 1 – Setup of StarWind VTL, Cloud Replication and a simple backup using Arcserve Backup (this video)
Part 2 – Full UDP Datastore Backup to StarWind VTL . Also shows the restoration process.
Part 3 – Incremental UDP Datastore Backup to StarWind VTL.
Why Virtual Tape Libraries Still Matter
Physical tape has been a mainstay of enterprise backup for decades, and for good reason. Tape media is cheap, portable, and inherently air-gapped when stored offline. However, managing physical tape comes with operational overhead: tape libraries need maintenance, media needs to be rotated and transported, and restores require the correct tape to be physically loaded.
StarWind VTL bridges this gap by presenting virtual tape drives and media to backup software like Arcserve Backup. The backup software writes to what it believes are physical tapes, but the data actually lands on disk storage. From there, StarWind VTL handles the automated archival of virtual tapes to cloud object storage — Amazon S3, S3 Glacier, Backblaze B2, Wasabi, or Microsoft Azure Blob Storage.
This gives organisations the best of both worlds: the proven tape-based workflow that Arcserve Backup excels at, combined with the economics and durability of cloud storage for long-term retention.
What This Demo Series Covers
In Part 1 (this video), the setup process walks through:
- Installing StarWind VTL on a Windows Server — the VTL runs as a Windows service and presents iSCSI tape targets to the network
- Configuring virtual tape drives and media pools — you define how many virtual tape drives are available and how large each virtual tape cartridge is
- Setting up cloud replication — connecting StarWind VTL to an Amazon S3 bucket so that completed virtual tapes are automatically archived to the cloud
- Creating a basic backup job in Arcserve Backup — selecting the VTL as the backup destination and running the first backup
Parts 2 and 3 extend this foundation to show how Arcserve UDP datastore data can be backed up to the VTL, covering both full and incremental approaches.
Cloud Replication and Lifecycle Management
One of StarWind VTL’s strongest features is its built-in lifecycle management for virtual tape media. When a virtual tape is ejected (either manually or by the backup job completing), StarWind can automatically:
- Replicate the tape to cloud storage — The virtual tape image is uploaded to the configured cloud target. For Australian organisations, using Wasabi’s Sydney region or an S3 bucket in ap-southeast-2 keeps data within the country.
- Apply tiered storage policies — Move tapes from S3 Standard to S3 Glacier after a defined period (e.g., 30 days), then to Glacier Deep Archive after 90 days. This matches common regulatory retention requirements while minimising storage costs.
- Maintain a local cache — Recent virtual tapes are kept on local disk for fast restores, while older tapes are stored exclusively in the cloud. If a cloud-only tape needs to be restored, StarWind retrieves it automatically.
Practical Deployment Considerations
When deploying StarWind VTL with Arcserve Backup, there are a few things to keep in mind:
- Disk sizing — The local VTL storage needs enough capacity to hold the active tape pool plus a cache of recent tapes. Size this based on your daily backup volume multiplied by your desired local retention period.
- Network bandwidth — Cloud replication runs in the background, but you need sufficient upload bandwidth to archive tapes to the cloud before the next backup cycle fills new tapes. For large environments, consider scheduling cloud uploads during off-peak hours.
- Encryption — StarWind VTL supports AES-256 encryption of virtual tape data before it is uploaded to the cloud. Always enable this for compliance and to protect data in transit and at rest.
Both StarWind and Arcserve are available through Cloud Ready Solutions for partners across Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands.