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Best course of action; physical tape media failure

Damo_S
Level 2

Hi all,

We've had a tape fail that we use to store incremental backups on, it's only just begun being used (past two days of incremental backups covered) and has now failed.

We run full backups every 3 months, and the incremental media set handles a daily incremental backup except when the full backup is running.

I believe I need to expire the backup sets from the failed media, so that no further incremental backups, until the next full backup; will need them as a dependency. I'm fine with losing the backed up files from that period that would now have had their archive attribute reset (we can easily cover this small time frame with previous versions).

What is the best way for me to achieve this? I can't expire the data from the backup sets view, I don't believe scratching or retiring them will help either. It's going to be bad news if we have run a new full backup set because this...

Thanks!

-D.

2 REPLIES 2

pkh
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP    Certified

The way to get rid of these incrementals is to overwrite the tape that they are on.  However, I am not sure what is the effect on the subsequent increments.  The proper way to remedy your situation is to do a full backup and start a new chain.  If you choose to continue with what you plan to do, you are on your own.

As an aside, you should do your full backup more frequently.  Imagine if our tape failed close to the end of the 3 months worth of increments.

Hi pkh,

Thanks for the feedback; I thought that would be the case and that I would end up having to run a full data set again.

In relation to the full backup frequency; the tape run off is to satisfy an 'immutable' backup set requirement and is in addition to a couple of other flavours of backup, so I'm not too concerned with the length between the full backups.

Thanks,

-D.