BE2012 Incrementals to disk, Full to tape?

[james_morgan]

I've seen similar questions asked, but none of those had an exact answer as to whether this was possible.

The root and cause of the problem is that we are struggling for disk space due to the BE 2012 not giving the simple option of "delete the oldest backup on the disk only when it meets a threshold I set".
As a result I have to 'guess' how many backups I can fit on each disk, resulting in much wasted disk space.
This also prevents me joining my 5 disks as a RAID array as that would only increase the headache of working out how many times each server could fit on it.

Due to this, I want to change things to do a Friday Full backup to disk, and then Incrementals to disk Mon-Thurs.

Each day I want a 'full' duplicate to tape.  So by the time it reaches Thursday night, I want it to backup last Friday's Full backup, as well as all the Incrementals since.
I only ever want to be restoring from a single tape to make disaster recovery as simple as possible.

So is the above possible?
Is there any work around I can use if not?

[pkh]

You should duplicate the Friday's full backup to tape after the full backup job and not wait until the end of your cycle.  For each of the incrementals, you would duplicate and append to this tape.  At the end of the cycle, you would have the full + all the incrementals that you need.

[james_morgan]

It's actually a full duplicate backup to tape that I want every day.

So to disk would be 1 day full, 4 days incremental.
To tape I would want the full, then the full+incremental, then the full+2 incrementals, up to Thursday where I'd have the full+4 incrementals on that tape.

Tape-wise time is an issue more than space, so I can't have it backing up to disk and then again to tape. The full tape backup each night has to come from a duplicate.
The problem is disk-wise space is an issue, hence wanting to switch to incrementals.

[james_morgan]

Just to clarify the above, it's a different tape each day.

[Colin_Weaver]

For most of our GRT capability (not 100% sure about all, although pretty sure about VMware as an example), if the full backup is no longer present on disk then the later incremental or differential backups to disk will have problems. Additionally you cannot do a full backup direct to tape and incrementals to disk as we cannot correctly link up the image mounts for the GRT catalogs and restores if you try that.

If you are only looking at standard file system/remote agent backups then I think you can mix and match with the full on  tape and the incrementals on disk.

[james_morgan]

If I was to mix the other 4 days (incremental on disk and full on tape), is there a way of scheduling one to follow the other directly? (I can't see that option if so)

If not, what will happen if they overlap, ie 2 backups running at the same time backing up the same resource?  Hopefully the second will simply wait for the other to finish?

Seems like a reasonable work around.

[AshutoshTamhank]

How big are the full and incremental backups? Is doing differentials not a good idea, as it reduces the complexity when doing the restores, although the amount of data backed up is higher than incrementals. Are you not considering deduplication to save disk space and may be do your duplicates to a dedupe folder in addition to a long term tape duplicate?

[james_morgan]

Total full backup size is about 2TB, that's going to 5x3TB disks (not raided), and 2x LTO 5 tapes per night.

I would expect incrementals to be pretty small, which is why I wanted to switch so the disk backups which are much easier to restore from go further back than a few days.  One server is using 1TB, but I think only 20GB or so would change each night.
So differentials would also work, I guess I'd need 2 tapes for full recovery then which would still complicate matters when it came to sending and recovering tapes in offsite storage.
We want super simple disaster recovery, which is what we get with full backups every night and SDR at hand.

Deduplication would be good, but that prevents SDR working - I'd much rather have SDR than deduplication.
I also keep back a tape set every quarter as a long term backup.

I hope you can see the dilemma, it seems you can't really have everything perfect, always tradeoffs.

[JustTryinToGetI]

How do you simply create a backup job to take data off of a disk and send it to tape?

I am not looking for B2D,D2T or any other acronyms....

I have data on storage device that I want to put onto a connect tape library.

Thanks...I think....