Limitations

The limitations of tape device usage are the following:

1. Tape devices are not supported when a machine is booted from 32-bit Linux-based bootable media.
2. You cannot back up the following data types to tapes: Microsoft Office 365 mailboxes, Microsoft Exchange mailboxes.
3. You cannot create application-aware backups of physical and virtual machines.
4. In macOS, only file-level backup to a managed tape-based location is supported.
5. The consolidation of backups located on tapes is not possible. As a result, the Always incremental backup scheme is unavailable when you back up to tapes.
6. The deduplication of backups located on tapes is not possible.
7. The software cannot automatically overwrite a tape that contains at least one non-deleted backup or if there are dependent backups on other tapes.
8. You cannot recover under an operating system from a backup stored on tapes if the recovery requires the operating system reboot. Use bootable media to perform such recovery.
9. You can validate any backup stored on tapes, but you cannot select for validation an entire tape-based location or tape device.
10. A managed tape-based location cannot be protected with encryption. Encrypt your backups instead.
11. The software cannot simultaneously write one backup to multiple tapes or multiple backups through the same drive to the same tape.
12. Devices that use the Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) are not supported.
13. Barcode printers are not supported.
14. Linear Tape File System (LTFS) formatted tapes are not supported.