cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Incremental backup writing to full media

PaulFTRW
Level 2

I have an interesting question. I am also fairly new to Backup exec

Background:

I am doing incremental backups daily and full backups File servers on Saturdays and SQL Sundays. While the full backups are running I am doing incremental as well. I have 2 drives so this should not be an issue. I also just recently switch from LTO 4 to LTO 6. I am only using 2 tapes. 1 for the incremental and 1 for the fulls as the data cant fill one tape(LTO6). I have set media for full and incremental for tracking purposes.

Situation:

At some point late in the week Friday night or early Saturday I have an incremental backup that is changing my Full tape to incremental. Therefore killing all my full backups for the weekend. 

I have limited tapes so I want to keep my tapes to 2 a week. I have tried a different combination of setting for media and can not seem to get this to stop. 

 

Any Help is appreciated.

8 REPLIES 8

pkh
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP    Certified

1) Are these tape drives stand-alone tape drives or are they contained in a tape library?

2) Did you specify different media sets for your full and incremental backups?

3) Did you target your jobs to specific tape drives or to All Devices?

PaulFTRW
Level 2

1). The drives are in a Tape library

2). Yes

3). No I target them to specific media and use any available tape drive.

Colin_Weaver
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified

in your answer to 3 do you mean you partition the slots in library and target the partition or are you just stating you targetted a media set?

If you targetted the media set then be aware that if an individual tape is overwritable then that media can be moved between sets by Backup Exec.There are rules based on BE settings that govern this provided in our admin guides although you can only change the order of decision making for chosing overwritable tapes you can't stop tapes from moving between sets if you just rely on media protection options and job start choices.

If you partition the slots and send the jobs to a parttition then you can stop the job from using a different tape, however this increases your chances of job failure if all of the tapes in a partition are not usable at the time the job requires a tape,

 

pkh
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP    Certified

See this document on how BE searches for overwritable media

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO22313

PaulFTRW
Level 2

Ok I understand. So what I got from that Is I need to partition. I am not worried about the tape that is being written to as I can fit a weeks worth of incrementals on one tape. Thank you for your replies.

pkh
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP    Certified
The reason why your job is writing to another media set means that your OPP/AP settings is not correct. Until you have corrected this, positioning your tape library would men that your job would fail due to the lack of overwritable tapes

PaulFTRW
Level 2

I took a look at my OPP/AP settings for my incremental tapes and they are set correctly. OPP - 3 Weeks and AP - 1 week. The first backup to incremental is usually on Monday or Tuesday at the latest. The issue I am having is late Friday or Saturday. The only other thing I can come up with is a job taking to long and forcing the next job to use the other tape. 

 

Edit: The last statement is exactly what is happening. I just caught it doing it. If I force jobs to a certain drive i.e Incremental's only use drive 2 and full's only use drive 1, could this help solve this issue?

pkh
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP    Certified

The issue I am having is late Friday or Saturday.

It could be that the tape is full and another tape is required.  Otherwise, see my article below on why your job is not appending to the tape.

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/why-my-job-not-appending-data-my-tapes

The only other thing I can come up with is a job taking to long and forcing the next job to use the other tape. 

This means that you have not scheduled your jobs correctly and targeting your job to use a particular tape drive would not solve the problem