Father-Son Rotation Guidance

[OKSDE]

Our current resources (both hardware and monetary) hamper the ability to perform a full Grandfather - Father - Son backup Rotation.  We are currently utilizing a hybrid Father/Son backup as follows:

5 Weekly Full Backups (done friday night)
2 Weeks of Daily Incremental (Mon - Thu) backup to disk w/ copy to tape.

My Full backup is done straight to tape (Compressed LTO 3)

I have established a policy to perform this task selecting from two media sets (Full and Incremental).

I have encountered two issues that I need guidance correcting.

1.  During the incremental, the backup to disk rotates only two files instead of 8.  How to I configure the backup to cycle between 8 files over two weeks?
2.  I need to write protect the tapes until the next time they are needed.  So incrementals should be write protected for 13 days while fulls are write protected for 27 days.

So far, utilizing "media management options", I've only figured out that "None" allows me to perform a backup.  "Partial" will not allow me to write to the tapes.

[SystemsAdminAS]

I believe the default behavior for B2D is to keep backups (incremental, full, whatever) into files no larger than 4 GB, so if your backed up data is larger than that, BE will distribute your backup across multiple files.  If you had 11 GB of backup, there should be 3 files in this way, 2 @ 4 GB each and 1 @ 3 GB.  You can have several backups within these files, so 1 file does not always correspond to one backup..

Check out your B2D files and check how many backups are contained in those files by beginning a restore - my guess is you'll browse and see your multiple incrementals...

You can change the # of backup files allowable and their size, so this may not be accurate for what you're seeing on your end..

I'm running a GFS scheme also, though my dailies are now fulls instead of incrementals due to the size of the data in question.  I use an LTO4 cart for each of Mon - Thurs (son), and the weeklies (father) occur Friday.  Since noone is in the building on weekends, the first Friday of the month is our grandfather.  We have 4 tapes for the weeklies (2nd - 5th week of the month) and 2 grandfathers, so our backups can go back as far as about 3 months..

[OKSDE]

I walked myself through setting this up with that giant admin guide.  So I think I changed the defaults on that.
Attached is my B2D Device settings.  I have all of 1.8 TB for incrementals.  My daily reports show between 50 and 75 gb being backed up daily and over 980GB in my full backup.

I thought the "Maximum Number of Backup Sets per Backup to Disk File" was the option to tell it to make 8 backups and then start recycling.  But as you can see, it has only generated two and rotates between them every other weekday.

I need it to create a seperate file for each of the 8 daily incrementals and after two weeks, start using the oldest file.

 

[pkh]

I thought the "Maximum Number of Backup Sets per Backup to Disk File" was the option to tell it to make 8 backups and then start recycling

Backup sets are resources backed up.  For example, if your job backs up a drive and a SQL database, this counts as 2 backup sets.  Each volume, system state, database counts as 1 backup set.

You control the re-cycling of .bkf files using the OPP setting.  For example, if you want to keep the data for one week, you set the OPP to 6 days.  After a week, 7 sets of .bkf files will be created.  The OPP for the oldest set will get expire and then it will get overwritten by the next job..