Full backup on new tape then incremental

Backup Exec can come pretty close.

Backup Exec works on timing, not capacity.  So you will need to determine how many days/weeks/months worth of data that you want on any one tape.  Then you would have the tape ejected and start again with a full, overwriting backup before adding incrmental appends.  Typically, people get int he habit of changing tapes daily, weekly or monthly, based on their needs, but basically, it becomes a human habit or scheduled event for somebody.

The risk/downside is that tapes will not be 100% full.  The closer you get to predicting tapes to be fairly full before changing tape/cycles, the greater your risk of spilling over to a second tape.  There is nothing technically wrong with spilling to a second tape, but it messes with some peoples planning and cartridge management processes.

Hi Larry,

Many thanks for the quick response.  As our data growth is quite small, we could potentially fit several months' worth of data before a tape change is needed.

In this case, I envisage we would perform a Full backup each 3 months for example, then a daily incremental.

When we anticipate the tape is almost full, it is changed, and a Full backup is manually run again.  Then the incrementals take over.

Does the above sound a workable solution?  Can Backup Exec detect a changed tape an automatically run the full backup? (perhaps pushing it a little there). 

Thanks

Tim

In this case, I envisage we would perform a Full backup each 3 months for example, then a daily incremental.

3 months of stuff that exists ONLY on one tape is too risky for me, but you might be OK with that risk.  It all depends upon personal needs & risks.  Tapes are fairly cheap, which wmight encourage montly rotations, even if they are nowhere near full, but YMMV.

When we anticipate the tape is almost full, it is changed, and a Full backup is manually run again.  Then the incrementals take over.
Can Backup Exec detect a changed tape an automatically run the full backup? (perhaps pushing it a little there). 

If the human decision is made to eject & change tapes, then that same human will need to manaully kick off the full backup.  BE knows when to overwrite vs append, but BE doesn't know when to do incrmental vs full without it being scheduled.  In other words, I don't know how to make BE decide to do a full backup simply because somebody changed the tape.

Many thanks Larry, most helpful.

One final question - I notice the Storage tab has a Capacity column which shows the total and remaining capacity for USB external drives - does this work the same way for tapes? (I guess it would only show the used space before hardware compression, but still).

many thanks for your assitance