Daily Backup Quirk

[boydfish]

We use tape backup in the school using the grandfather, father and son system; the daily backup is Incremental then we do a full backup at the weekend and it works OK apart from a small niggle. The Incremental tapes are all from the 'Daily Backup' tape set and everything is fine until the Thursday night jobs. Every previous night (Mon, Tue and Wed) a new tape is used but for some reason on Thursday it always ignores the 'Overwriteable' tape and uses one of the previously used ones from the set (If I don't remove the tapes daily!). It's not a major problem I suppose just a quirk I can't see why it does this each week unless I take the tapes out daily. Weird!!

[VJware]

Have a look @ this article which explains in detail how BE chooses a tape - http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO73320

[pkh]

Edit your Thursday job and check that it is set to append, instead of overwrite

*EDIT*

If you don't want jobs to append to your tapes, edit your media set and set the AP to 1 hour

*END EDIT*

[boydfish]

I checked the document and understand how tapes are selected and the system runs properly Mon Tue and Wed. So that would leave one remaining tape which would have the oldest append date so should take priority over the Wednesday one which will have a recent one; so, only on that one day does the rotation go wrong. All the daily jobs have the same settings and BE always selects another 'recyclable' tape except on a Thursday so whilst I could amend the AP to 1 hour surely that would apply to all jobs in the 'Differential' group wouldn't it? AFAIK there are no individual jobs for each day.

Like I said a mystery most peculiar!!

[pkh]

Yes. The AP WILL apply to all the tapes in the media set