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BackupExec keeps overwriting my tapes.

huain
Level 3

Hi

I'm trying to accomplish the this.

- Incremental, every weekday in one single 6Tb tape until it fills.

- Full, every saturday in one single 6Tb tape until it feels (we are talking in this moment of 600 Gb of information).

The problem is that despite the Incremental backup works fine, the Full backup keeps overwriting the tape.

In the main menu i have setup the Overwrite Protection to none.

The backup work is set to prevent overwrite but allow agregation.

But the job keep overwriting the tape, any idea?

 

Thanks in advance

12 REPLIES 12

CraigV
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Your Append/OPP settings of the 2 types of jobs are overlapping. Quite possibly the Daily backups aren't retaining data on tape for long enough, hence the Weekly overwriting it. Thanks!

But every job is in a different tape.

I'm working with a Lenovo TS2900 robotic tape.

pkh
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When you set the OPL to None, your OPP and AP settings will have no effect, i.e. your data are not protected.  Change your OPL to either Partial or Full and make sure that your OPP is sufficient long so that your incremental tape does not get overwritten.

Do read the tape management portion of the Admin Guide.

Colin_Weaver
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Employee Accredited Certified

You cannot really do a "until it fills scenario" as any kind of rule for changing behaviour. Once a tape fills, Backup Exec will immediately look for a tape to overwrite irrespective of any settings

 

Also setting overwrite protection to None will cause any previous backup to be overwritten as soon as BE needs a new tape and will ignore your Overwrite Protection Period settings - as per pkh info. (So this is a really bad idea as it is a data loss generating setting so and usually only used with stand alone tape drives in conjuction with ejecting media  at the ends of jobs - meaning a human has to be involved to overwrite a tape)

 

You do probably need to tell us teh apprx amount of data in your incremental and full backups along with which days you change tapes on (and whether or not you have a library containing multiple tapes) for us to come up with a valid way for you to deal with your issue - although as mentioned, you probably cannot plan to actually fill a tape completely and may have to accept only close to full (say above 85% used)

We woudl also need to know how long you want to keep the incremental and full backup sets for

Hi PKH

I understand that setting the OPL to none renders OPP and AP useless.

So tell me this, if the OPL is none can i append to a tape?, because my Incremental backup is working fine, it is appending to the tape.

Yesterday i set my Full Backup OPP to 4 weeks and AP to infinity and it worked and appended the backupto the tape.

Does OPL set to none means that the backups will be replaced allways no matter the backup job setting itself?

Thanks in advance

Colin_Weaver
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Employee Accredited Certified

OPL only renders the OPP useless the AP (and job start setting) remains valid.

"You cannot really do a "until it fills scenario" as any kind of rule for changing behaviour. Once a tape fills, Backup Exec will immediately look for a tape to overwrite irrespective of any settings"

I know that, but initially i'm watching the media and planning to replace the tape when it reach 95% or something.  This at least initially.

When I initially configured my TS2900 Tape Library set any one of the 9 tape slots as a separate storage since i was planning to use LTO7 tapes of 6Tb which is plenty.

Waiting for your comments 

Hi Colin

What should be, in your opinon, the OPL, OPP and AP to achieve what i described in the initial post.

Incremental added to one tape until it is near to fill.

Full add to another tape until it is near to fill.

I would monitor the media to replace the tapes when they were almost depleted. I know it is not ideal, but initially i would go through this avenue.

Thanks in advance.

"You do probably need to tell us teh apprx amount of data in your incremental and full backups along with which days you change tapes on (and whether or not you have a library containing multiple tapes) for us to come up with a valid way for you to deal with your issue - although as mentioned, you probably cannot plan to actually fill a tape completely and may have to accept only close to full (say above 85% used)"

My incremental so far just a couple of Gigabytes.

My full so far less than 300 Gb but that will be changing very soon as more data woill be added to the new servers.

Colin_Weaver
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Employee Accredited Certified

Set OPL to something other than none (suggest default of Partial with prompt) and note you have to do this to avoid possible future data loss no matter what other choices of config you make.

create 2 media sets - 1 for incremental and one for full (using two media sets stops the full using same tape as incremental except during an overwrite and also allows for different retention timings if this is needed)

create 2 single slot partitions within your 9 slots (only needed if you want to force BE to use specific tapes for incrementals and fulls and never select any others) - thsi setting wil cuse jib falurs if the tapes in te slots cannt be used for append or overwrite)

Make the full job append at start, with overwrite if no appendable available and tell it to use the full media set (and full partition if created)

Make the incremental job also append at start overwrite if no appendable available and tell it to use the incremental media set (and incremental partition if created)

To start the sequence, make sure there are inventoried and overwriteable tapes available (if partitioned these must be in the relevant slots) - put the tapes in question in the scratch set to make them overwriteableand then run a full as the first job

 

For append periods - if you are going to manually watch for how full they are then you can set infinite, however you could make an estimate of how many backups it would take to get close to full and set the append period to that time (which if you have not used partitioning would force Backup Exec to use a new tape from a different slot anyway)

For overwrite period set it to slightly shorter than the time you expect to not want to overwrite the tape for as you will be using other tapes.

 

NOTE: there is a huge concern about your startegy

If (as an example) you put 1-2 months worth of consecutive full backups on one tape and the tape is damaged or corrupted (or something like a fire or flood affects your server room) you lose the lot

The same kind if applies to damage to the incremental tape (although is not quite as bad as you would still have your full tape unless it is a fire or flood which takes out both tapes)

 

As such you should really be making Backup Exec use different tapes for consective full jobs by rotating the tapes in and out of the library  (which does not mean you cannot append back to earlier, non-consecutively used tapes to maximize space used)

 

We don't often get customers using tapes that are significantly larger than the amount of data being backed up, which means they can usually accept that a set of nightly jobs might not fill a tape and as such media set control alone is not designed  to force consecutive backups onto different tapes.

 

Thanks Colin

I'll try your suggestion.

The tapes eventually will catch the amount of data to be saved but right now we are migrating between domains and backup estrategies.