BAckup media question

[leeg]

Hi, first post and hoping for some advice. Just getting my head around the media and scratch and media sets etc.

I am wanting to have a daily differential backup and then at weekends have a full backup. I have  3 sets of tapes.

I have done this:

Full backup to run Sat/SUN

Created media set and set overwrite to 21 days

Diff back to run MTWTF

Created media set to 7 days

OK,

Running full back

I will put the Set1 media into the scrath media and have the full backup find and overwrite it on completion. It will then allocate to the weekend mediaset.

The diff backups should run for the rest of the week.

My question is what should i do fo for the next weekend full backup as i want to use set2 and take set1 offf site.

Should i export set1 and then import set2 and then put set2 to scratch media?

Any help would be appreciated. But be gentle as I am struggling to get a low administration backup yet resilient to some degree.

Many thanks

Graeme

[Ken_Putnam]

I'd set the Overwrite Protection Period (OPP) for the FULLs to 20 days, in case the backup ends after midnight)

Similarly, I'd  set the daily OPP to 6 days

To your question

Are you using a loader or stand alone drives?   if a Loader, are you using partitions?

[leeg]

Hi Ken, thanks for your reply.

I am using a Sony lib-81 8tape library. No, I don't use partitions. Is it advisable? Why?

Many thanks

[leeg]

Ok, can anyone point me in the direction of where to find out about partitioning for library loaders? Done a search and cant find much, so don't really know why I should do it and the benefits involved.

Thanks

[Ken_Putnam]

partitioning allows you to specify which slot(s) a particular job is allowed to write to, rather than any scractch/overwriteable tape that is mounted

See the Admin Guide for setup specifics

As to your origianl question about  rotatiing tapes, that looks like it should work 

If you do not go with partitions, I'd set the Global Media Management options (tools\Options\Media Management) to

Either Full or Partial

And select "Use Overwriteable Media in the target media set before Scratch media"  so that a weekly job does not grab a daily tape or vice versa  

[leeg]

Thank you very much Ken. The Admin guide? Where is it?

Appreciate the help.

[Ken_Putnam]

See http://ftp.support.veritas.com/pub/support/products/Backup_Exec_for_WindowsNT/279401.pdf

[leeg]

You are indeed a hero Ken