How to automate rotation of Tape out to Offsite storage...

[blaine_miller]

Hello,

For the life of me, I can't seem to figure this out. I have a single Media server with two tape libraries attached. Each Library has a single drive, one ejection slot and 23 tape media slots. I'm using Backup Exec 12.5 running on Windows Server 2003, R2 Standard edition 64 bit.

I'm using the media server as a nearline data repository in that I have a *C:* drive for O/S and Applications(like BEWS) and a single large RAID'ed *D:* drive I'm copying data to in top level directories, one for each server I'm nearline'ing.

I have several backup jobs that backup one or more of the top level subdirectories on the media server to tape at various windows of opportunity during a 24 hour period.

I've had this system running well for about a year. Now I have a requirement to offsite tape media in a Grandfater, Father, Son rotation. I've looked at the GFS policy template and can't figure out how to do what I need to do to get what tapes ejected from which Library when.

In the older system I'm replacing, there is a single magazine of tapes that get written and rotated in and out in GFS series. Backups of systems that are necessary for this offsiting of media are catagorized automatically.

I can give more detail as necessary. I'm just stuck for how to automatically eject only those tapes necessary from the most recent backup from a library that has a single ejection slot.

I'm really stuck and would appreciate whatever pointers/assistance you can give. I've looked through the Symantec onsite Technical documents and have found nothing that resembles doing what I need to do.

Thanks...

Blaine Miller

[pkh · Accepted solution]

The easiest way is to have an export template in your policy and link this to your backup job.  This way, after the job is completed, the tape(s) would be exported to the mailslot.  If you have more than 1 tapes to export, then you would receive an alert asking you to remove the first tape.  After your have done so, the second tape would be placed in the mailslot automatic and an alert issued to ask you to remove the tape from the mailslot.  The cycle continues until the all the tapes are exported.