Associate tape with multiple media sets?

[nyquist10]

Associate tape to multiple media sets.

Hi all,

                After reading the Admin’s Guide for BE 2010, I tried to configure a backup environment with BE 2010 R3 by “fixing” an already running non-functional environment in which disk space was always running out.

Since I don’t have enough experience with backup software, concepts, tape libraries, etc., I helped myself by googling and looking for people knowledge and useful experiences with BE, good backup strategies, etc.

Long story short.. I decided to create a backup scheme/structure similar to the following:
(I’ve separated the GRTs from the incremental weeklies and from the exchange (also GRT), just to be able to split them into different disks, some of them old iSCSI with slow links).

-          Weekly – 01 – Sunday (inc)

-          Weekly – 02 – Monday (inc)

-          …..

-          ……

-          Weekly – 07 – Saturday (full)

-          Monthly – 01 - …… (full)

-          Yearly – 01 - …. (full)

-          GRTs – 01 - Sunday(full)

-          GRTs – 02 - Monday (full)

-          ….

-          …

-          Exchange – 01 - Sunday (full)

-          Exchange – 02 - Monday (full)

-          ….

-          ….

As far as I understood, this was a good structure to work with if you were planning to work with a tape library too (preventing accidental overwriting of your data, etc.)

So I generated the media sets, devices, device pools, selection lists and jobs.. BUT when I got to the “duplication jobs” I found that for my scheme I would need too many tapes since I cannot associate a tape with multiple media sets.

We have a 24 slots tape library and I need to find a solution, so I appreciate your opinion, guys.
What should be the best way to fix my scheme? (which is functional but it’s not duplicating the information into the tapes right now.

1. Change the current scheme in which Job “A” use device “A” and media “A” to something like “Job A,B,C,D”… use a device and media shared by all of them ?
2. Rebuild all and go with a scheme similar to “daily – Incremental”, “Weekly – Full”, “Monthly – Full” and “Yearly – Full”?
3. Is there a posibility to use "pre-post commands" to associate tapes to a media set under "Settings" within a Job?
4. ?

I’ll appreciate any link, information or knowledge you can share with me.

Regards,

Max

[Ken_Putnam]

Sorry, no can do.  A tape can  belong to one and only one media set.

You CAN run multiple jobs and append then to the same tape, as long as they use the same media set

[pkh]

A media set is used to define the OPP and the AP of the media that belongs to it.  If the OPP and AP of the data that is backed up by your various jobs are the same, you can use the same media set.  You don't have to create a different media set for each job.