Consolidate Backup Sets

Question

I have a 4 tape drive library.&nbsp; At the moment, the jobs use all the drives, which is good, until I see bunches LTO5 tapes with 20GB or less on them.&nbsp; Not to fussed with the daily or weekly tapes but this is wasteful for monthly tapes.

Is there a way to consolidate all the small&nbsp;backup sets across the monthly media to a&nbsp;single tape of my choosing after the fact?&nbsp; I can't see&nbsp; where the duplicate backup set option will allow this.

pkh · Accepted Answer

You can create a temporary media set, set the AP to a long time, put a single tape into this temporary media set and then have your jobs target this media set. This way they will all append too this one tape

pkh · Answer

In your duplicate job, choose to append to the tape. &nbsp;You must ensure that the AP is long enough so that the tape is appendable. &nbsp;The AP is set in the media set containing the tape.

backupexecnewb · Answer

How do I specify that it goes to a specific tape?&nbsp; The only options I see is the storage, retention, schedule, compression and ecryption.

pkh · Answer

Unless you are using a stand-alone tape drive, it is very difficult to specify a specifc tape. &nbsp;Normally, you would specify the AP such that there is only one appendable tape in the media set and naturally all the jobs will append to this tape.

backupexecnewb · Answer

That's disappointing. I know it can be done in NetBackup.&nbsp; Was hoping there was soem funcitonality withing BE to do this.

colin_weaver · Answer

In BE you also have to make sure the jobs do not try to run in parallel (especially if you have two tape drives in your library) as if they run in parallel the second job might choose a different tape because the state of the first tape is unknown whilst a job is using it.

&nbsp;

NetBackup has a multi-plexing option that writes simultaneous data streams into one tape (and might be what you are referring to). Backup Exec does not have this and probably never will as it is a complicated function of the more expensive backup products that are specifically designed for very large enterprises. What Backup Exec has is the Append function which means once one backup has finished writing to a tape, a following backup can then add data to the empty space on the end of the same tape.

Forum Discussion

Consolidate Backup Sets

11 Replies

Related Content

Error in some VMware backups snapshots - (4275) Unable to consolidate Virtual Machine Disks

(4275) Unable to Consolidate Virtual Machine Disks.

No backup sets found

EV Server consolidation

Consolidated monitoring Dashboard

Recent Discussions

Backup Exec Job got canceled

BackupExec for Oracle 23ai?

Add Oracle DB in Backup Exec

Veritas Backup Exec version upgrade & migrate to another new Server

Veritas Backup Exec 23 - Slow Backup after Windows server 2019 upgrade