Can't duplicate full and incremental backups to tapes

[PMWJH]

Hello,

We are having trouble with duplicating full and incremental backups to tape with slot partitions (Monday through Sunday as seen below):

We're using Backup Exec 2015 and each night our file server backups to a hard drive and then those backups on the hard drive are duplicated to tape.

To shorten our backup times, our full backup is scheduled to run once a week at Friday night and then incremental backups run Saturday night through Thursday night and then the cycle repeats each week.

Since we also take backup tapes off site and cycle old tapes back on site each day, we wanted the tapes to contain the following:

Friday Tape = Fri Full Backup

Saturday Tape = Fri Full + Sat Incremental

Sunday Tape = Fri Full + Sat Incr + Sun Incr

Monday Tape = Fri Full + Sat Incr + Sun Incr + Mon Incr

Tuesday Tape =  Fri Full + Sat Incr + Sun Incr + Mon Incr + Tues Incr

Wednesday Tape = Fri Full + Sat Incr + Sun Incr + Mon Incr + Tue Incr + Wed Incr

Thursday Tape = Fri Full + Sat Incr + Sun Incr + Mon Incr + Tue Incr + Wed Incr + Thu Incr

However, that's not the result we're getting on the tapes. The tapes seem to only contain the latest backup from the night before despite having the Source set to All backups as seen below:

Are we missing another setting somewhere or do we have our schedule laid out improperly?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, we've been reading the manual and looking around online at the Veritas website with no sucess so far.

[Colin_Weaver]

As far as I can tell you are trying to come up with an inventive way to make the traditonal incremental backup methods more user friendly when it comes to a restore. Unfortunately it is not as easy as that.

Within a job definition,  the duplicate jobs will only duplicate the last set or sets  that have not already been duplicated. So the "All Backups" really means all backups that have not been duplicated. If you take the term "all backups" literally then we would in theory go back to the very first backup (not just the last full)  which obviously would be a bad idea. Hence logically it does make sense for it to mean all non-duplicated sets.

So you can't do a rolling backup of having the complete incremental chain on every day's tape. For simplicity a full backup with duplication every day would be better. (although might have a timeing/backup window impact). Your other option is just use incrementals as traditonally intended - where you bring all the tapes back so make sure the weekly and daily tapes are protected for slightly longer than the Thursday tape to maintain the chain. (although I would make life easier for myself and switch to differentials so then I only have to maintain 2 tapes to get my data back (the full and one differential)

The closest you could get to your idea is to use synthetic backups with everything going to disk initially and then only duplicate the synthetic full results to tape each day - however depending on the type of data being backed up, then it has been known for the synthetic enabled incremenal stage to take longer that a non-synthetic enabled full stage of the same data - oh and you may need an ESO (ADBO) license to use synthetic

Finally one IMPORTANT thing you might not be aware of

Backup Exec 15 lets you see restore selections from incremental and differential sets based on a point in time view of the server (so it looks in the restore selections as if it was a full.) If you select files for restore from this view that were actually backed up on different tapes/dates because of your incremental chain back to the full, then as long as every tape in the chain  is in your library and inventoried everything will be restored in one job as Backup Exec will just use the correct tape when it needs to. If the tapes are not all in the library you will be prompted for media but it will still be handled in one job.

This is a huge enhancement on how incrementals usually work as in the past you would have had to restore the data from the full then restore the data from each folloinwg  incremental (in order, as separate jobs) until you got forwards to the most recent date you are interested in restoring to.

This enhancement kind of means as long as you are careful with your tapes your idea of trying to get the full chain on one tape is not needed because we have made the restore MUCH easier.