What actually gets written to tape by long-term protection?

Question

I've been reviewing our long term recovery goals and am confused by the Customize Recovery Goal screen. The only documentation I can find for it only gives brief descriptions and is for 2010, I'm using 2012 R2.
Customizing Recovery Goals for Long-Term Protection
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff399209.aspx
I notice it says 'Back up every:' under the recovery goals, not 'colocate'. Does this mean that it will take a backup and write it directly to tape instead of writing the recovery points on disk to tape?
The specify long-term goals screen in the Modify Group wizard says 'All long-term tape-based protection uses full backups.' Does this mean the file and application recovery points from the short term protection aren't written to tape?

Answer 1

Hi,
<snip>
What actually gets written to tape by long-term protection?
>snip<
It really depends if you are using short-term to disk or not.
1) You are using short-term to disk, long term to tape (D2D2T)
       In this configuration the last successful disk based recovery point is written to tape. 
       The data is read from DPM recovery point and copied to tape.
2) You are using short-term to tape and long term to tape (D2T2T)
     The first LT recovery goal is a full backup taken from the protected server.
      Other LT goals are tape copies from lesser goals, so you need multiple tape drives.
As noted - all long term tape backups are full backups, no incremental backups are possible.
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