Advice on Daily Tape backups

[IsaacICSM]

Hi all,

I am really only after some advice on the best way of creating daily backups to a tape library.

Up until recently (when I fiddled with the BE 2012 settings) we had daily backup jobs setup to store to individual mon/tue/wed/thur/fri media sets - that is, each day had its own media set with two tapes (week 1 set and a week 2 set).

Of course this also entailed 5 'daily' jobs for each server - a mon/tue/wed/thur/fri job which was identical for each job, it would just be pointed to its corresponding storage set.

In my infinite wisdom, I thought that I could make this less complicated by removing all the daily jobs, and consolidate them into one job, and one media library with all of the daily tapes in it. I thought that some smart setup of overwrite protection levels would allow me to continue having a monday tape, which was only overwriteable on monday, and then the period would be set once the job was complete to 342 hours (just under a fortnight).

By doing it this way, I thought I would achieve: Backups to a specific (day) tape for a specific day without having 5 different backup jobs for each server; and 5 different media sets for each daily tape. All of this while allowing appending to the tape until it was full (keeping a few week's worth of backups on each tape).

Now, I have found that this does not work due to the fact that BE continually appends to the Monday tape and each day that it does, it sets it's overwrite protection period an extra day.

I have had a read through the admin manual in the overwrite/append sections; however this is not really giving me a concise answer.

Is there any way of keeping the number of backup jobs and media sets small, while still allowing me to have a monday backup that goes to monday tape, that can only be appended to each monday (until full)?

Thanks for any advice on this

[pkh · Accepted solution]

You only need 1 media with an AP of 6 days and an OPP of however long you want to retain the data on the tape.  The AP of 6 days means that by the following week, the tape is no longer appendable and BE will overwrite the next tape.  This is assuming that you are using "append, otherwise overwrite' in your jobs.

I presume that you are using a tape library.  Don't worry about what data ends up on which tape.  See my article below

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/must-mondays-backup-be-monday-tape

The thing to remember about AP and OPP is this

- AP is measured from the time the tape is first overwritten

- OPP is measured from the end of the job that last writes to the tape.

You might want to read this document

OPP and AP explanation

[IsaacICSM]

Great reading, and something that I had not worked out on my own - I have just been following what my predecessors have had in place.

This would solve many of my problems, as well as I can't see why it would not work in our environment.

Thank you phk!