Best practices for tape library�

[Peter_Sylvester]

Our company wanted to move away from our stand alone tape drive and got a Quantum Superloader 3 with and LTO3 drive that supports up to 8 cassettes.

Right now we are used to just popping in a new tape at the end of the night ans swapping tapes as needed during the day until the backup it done, though with the new LTO3 tapes it will only require 1 tape per night instead of multiple tapes.

What I was thinking of doing was setting up Veritas to use a different slot every night, ie: slot 1 for Monday, slot 2 for Tuesday, slot 3 for Wednesday, and so on. The problem is that no one here knows how that would be set up in Veritas.

My only other concern is if out backup continues to grow, what happens if we suddenly need 2 tapes and we have the program set for a different slot and only one slot every night?

I guess the bottom line question here is, what would be considered to be the �best practice� for using an autoloader like this for backup exec? Is there any good documentation online that I can read?

Thank you very much!!

[Sanjay_Raval]

Download backup exec admin guide will help you to understand your requirement.

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/269777.htm

[Keith_Langmead]

If you want to specify which tape is used on which day / by which job then you need to partition the library and point your backup jobs at the specific slot rather than library as a whole. Otherwise there's no reliable way to be certain which tape will be used on each backup. This does however mean that you need to duplicate your backup jobs one for each night, since each job will have a different destination.

Personally however I don't like the idea of using a library like this since you lose most of the benefits of tape backup, specifically the tapes being removed each day and taken off-site or put somewhere safe. After all, if you had a rotation for a week, so each Monday you changed the tapes round for the following week, what would happen if the building burnt down during the weekend? Yes you'd be happy in the knowledge you did regular backups, but that wouldn't help much when all the tapes for the last weeks worth of backups are still in the charred remains of your tape library, so you'd loose an entire weeks worth of work rather than just a days.