BE 2012 Installed. Questions..

1) How you order your jobs is dependent on your environment.  For example, you might want to back up Server 2 first so that you can run some other housekeeping jobs.  BE does not care what order the servers are backed up.

2) That is correct.  The first job should overwrite the tape and the rest of the job should append to the tape.  Make sure that you set the AP long enough so that when the last job starts, the tape is still appendable.

3) There is no way to schedule a tape eject.  You should check  "Eject the media after job completes" in the last scheduled backup job

Thanks for your reply pkh ...

1) Sorry about the confusion, but what I'm asking is, is that the method I've written a "correct" way of getting each server to backup on the tape each night?

2) Thank you

3) You realise I am talking about BE 2012 which was only recently released? It is possible to schedule a tape eject in this. Storage tab -> Click on tape device -> Eject drop down button -> Schedule.

1) That is one way to do it.  The other way is to schedule the following jobs so that they do not overlap the preceding jobs.  That is, Job 1 finishes roughly at 10  p.m.  Job 2 starts at 10.30 p.m.  I much prefer the latter method.

Since you want to append to your tapes, you should make sure that your jobs do not overlap.  When a job is using the tape, it is marked as not appendable.  When another job starts at this time and wants to append to the tape, it will not be able to find an appendable tape.  It will then switch to overwrite mode and wait.  When the first job ends and the tape is marked as appendable, the second job will not be able to switch back to append mode and will not be able to use the tape.

3) Sorry.  I am still exploring the various new features of BE 2012.  I would prefer to use the last job to eject the tape.  There is less chance of accidentally scheduling a job which will overwrite/append to the tape.

Thanks for the info pkh..

Does the job check for the "appendability" of a tape at the scheduled start time, or when the job actually runs?

I'll perform some tests tonight and let you know how it goes. Thanks again.

When the job starts.

I tried setting each of the 3 servers to backup at 9:01pm, 9:02pm, 9:03pm, hoping the 2nd and 3rd jobs would queue up when they saw that the tape drive was busy doing the 1st job. Unfortunately, the 2nd and 3rd jobs cancelled themselves and scheduled themselves for the next scheduled backup time (i.e. tomorrow night).

The only way I could find to do it is to set all servers to backup at the exact same scheduled time. When this time came around job1 started, and job2 and job3 set themselves to "Ready; No idle devices" status. job2 started when job1 was finished, and job 3 started when job2 was finished.
So if they were set to start at the same time, how did I set which server starts first and which runs last? I need to specify which starts first because this needs to be set to overwrite the tape and all other jobs append to it. The last job needs to be set to eject the tape. The way I did it is to set High priority for the first job, Medium for the middle job, and Low for the last job.

I just need to remember that if I have to change the scheduled start time, I need to do it with all jobs. This can be done by going into Storage tape, double-clicking on the tape drive, selecting all Jobs, right clicking and selecting "Edit Backups", and it will allow you to change settings for all jobs at once.

This new version to me isn't very intuitive. I like the new interface and it seems less cluttered than the old style, but this server-centric model just doesn't make sense. In the old model you have your backup job with global parameters for that job .. scheduled start time, overwrite/append, eject tape at end, etc, then add the servers you want to back up within these parameters (via the Selection List). Whereas with this new model you need to set these parameters for each and every server because each server has its own job, and it feels like there's more room for error. Or maybe I'm doing things the wrong way and there's a much simpler way - I'm more than happy for anyone to correct me.

Note, it is possible to include multiple servers in one job, and therefore have global settings that cover the servers in that job. Simply select the servers that you want to include in the job, click Backup -> (select the backup option you want). The issue here is that you then lose the ability to do custom selections. e.g. with backup up the file system, you must backup all files or no files - no drill down to select particular files or folder, and also you cannot choose to backup files on one server and not another. You must either select to backup the file system on both, or backup on none. The only way to do custom selections is to do separate backup job for each server. Also with these jobs with multiple servers in them I couldn't seem to find a way of adding additional servers to the job. Strange.

Anyway, it's all new, we'll see how things pan out. The main thing is that I have found a method in the madness :)

Schedule your jobs so that they do not overlap, i.e. start the next job AFTER the preceeding job ends.  You would have to estimate the length of the jobs and give a reasonable buffer between each jobs.

With all respect pkh, I don't think thats a very good solution. You will be relying on estimation, which isn't robust.
We need the backup time window as small as possible. So we can't have large gaps between jobs. So with your method if we make the gaps between jobs small, we risk overlapping occuring (and as a result jobs being skipped) as servers fill up with more data over time causing backup windows to increase.

My method of scheduling them all to run at the same time, and then using priorities has worked fine. The first job is overwriting, subsequent jobs appending, and the final job ejecting..

Hi

Could you please check let me know what is the setting you have kept in this option

Please click on as per the snap I have uploaded

Then check the option for keep the job schedule for is kept for how many hours it might be the case that in your case it would be less than 1 day that is less than 24 hours so your other job are getting rescheduled for next day so change it to 240 hours which is default again & check the results

Thanks

Using the priority method, you got to make sure that the time window is long enough so that the last job can start before the time window ends.

Also, you would be restricted to 3 jobs since there are only 3 priority settings.