Best way to manage daily tapes at weekends

[13four]

I'm looking for the best way to manage the Daily weekend backups.

Backup exec 12.5 & a Dell ML6000 Tape Library with 2 LTO4 

We run Full Daily backups Monday thru Sunday

There are currently a number of separate jobs that run daily, (exchange, file data, SQL, Oracle etc).  These usually run across 2 tapes (e.g. tape14-1 & tape 14-2 for the 14th of the month) but expect this will soon extend to 3.  This works fine Monday - Thursday, each afternoon i insert 2 tapes, the jobs run over night and then the 2 tapes of sent to off site storage.

The problems comes when it gets to the weekend, we get Friday, Saturday and Sundays tapes (6 tapes in all), as there are 3 sets i would like the backups to write to the relevant 2 tapes. (e.g. Saturday 17th to 17-1 & 17-2) but it doesn't seem to work like that.  the backups seem to span accross any of the 6 tapes.  Can anyone give any advice on how to do this?  I've read about partitioning the library but this would them mean more jobs in the list and then the issues when it comes to a public holiday or the backup needing and extra tape

Any help appreciated.

[CraigV]

Hi,

Do you run a GFS policy? If so, it means those jobs already exist, and all you would need to do is point those jobs to the library partitions you create.
I am not sure how many slots you have in that library with the various versions, but look at partitioning 3 slots (for your growth) for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. From there, go into your jobs, and point each job to a particular slot. Simple!
Partitioning the library is as simple as right-clicking the device and choosing Partition. Always select the slot BELOW the slot you want to include (ie. Slots 1 --> 3 must be a partition, so select slot 4!).
Let me know if you need further help.

[13four]

Thanks for your reply.....

I don't believe there are any policies running.

I understand that if i partition the library i can point jobs at specific slots but how would that work over a public holiday? 

Partiton 1 - Monday to Friday jobs
Partiton 2- Sautrday jobs
Parition 3 - Sunday jobs

If i had to load the tapes say on a thursday as the friday was a public holiday, there would be nowhere for the extra tapes, thursdays jobs would use partition1 but then fridays tapes would just be in unparitions slots and the friday back up would surely fail?

[13four]

Also we run exactly the same backup jobs every day (monday to sunday) , there are mn specific omes for the weekend, i guess using partitioning would require me to created specific jobs for the saturday and sunday backups in order to assign them to particular partitions?

[CraigV]

Hi,

Well, I would have it configured this way...

Monday --> Friday Jobs
* Same selection list
* partition the library with 5 x 3 slots (for your growth) = 15 slots
* Point the job to these slots
* Whichever tape is returned to scratch will be used, but you will have enough tapes for backups (you're providing 3)

Saturday jobs
* Same selection list
* Partition the library with 3 slots
* Point the job to these slots

Sunday jobs
* Same as above

If Friday is a public holiday, it shouldn't matter, as long as you have scratch tapes available. The idea here is not to have 7 jobs, but rather have less jobs for ease of manageability.
If you need more help, give me a shout...

[13four]

Hi,

Ok all sounds good.

Just so i'm on the same track, I've currently got around 10 selections list that are each run by a corisponding job, e.g Backup selection list for Exchange, Job name Exchange, this is the way it was orginal setup (not by me) but works well as if say the SQL jobs fails its easy to identify and re-run, and as we have 2 drives multiple jobs can run at once.

With your suggestion, i guess i'd have to consolitat the jobs? so that say 'Job Monday' would run all the 'selection lists'? same with 'Job Tuesday' and so on? so then i could assign 'Job Monday' to the first partion, 'Job Tuesday' to the second partition etc?

Thanks again for your help so far

[Ken_Putnam]

You could setup multiple jobs tied together with a policy so that the first of the night is an overwrite to the correct partition, then the second thru nth are all append to the same partition

You are correct that if feels mucn better to know exactly which step of a multi step backup failed when you see the "FAILED" status  

And Symantec has always recommended that database backup are in a job by themselves,. not mixed in with other database types or flat-file or sysvol backups

[CraigV]

Hi 13four,

Any news here? Has this helped at all in solving this?