Overwrite Protection and Incremental Backups

[Dav_Banks]

Hi,
I'm having a little trouble setting up Incremental backups the way I want. I'm doing weekly full backups and would like to do nightly Incrementals. I originally set the OPP to one week and the AP to infinite.
I figured this would allow appending all week but protect the incrementals from being overwritten for one week - until the next full was done.
The incrementals do seem to be protected but subsequent incrementals pulls a new tape from the autoloader instead of appending to the current tape.
Question: How does the OPP and AP need to be set to allow appending daily incrementals while protecting the previous ones from that week until the next full is done.
Thanks in advance for any help!!!

[Ken_Putnam]

OPP is calculated from the time the LAST backup set on a tape is closed.
APP is calculated from the time the FIRST backup set on a tape is opened

With OPP of 1 week, if you place the Incrementals on the same tape as the FULL, the tape will be protected until one week after the last INCR runs

If you do Fulls on Friday, and INCR the rest fo the week, if the Full runs on the 1st, and the INCR run on the 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th, the tape will be write protected until the 15th.

[Dav_Banks]

OK...
The question really is, How do I get to this point?

With the OPP set to one week, the closing of the incremental would, according to your info and what I've seen, lock the tape for one week forcing the next incremental onto the next tape wasting a huge amount os space on each tape.

However, setting the OPP to less than a week would seem to allow subsequent incrementals to overwrite the ones before it.

I'm not sure what the contextual meaning of append is but the plain english meaning would seem to suggest that allowing appending during the protection period would allow the tape to be written to without overwriting what's already there.

This doesn't appear to be the case. My OPP is set at 1 week to protect the incrementals until the next full is done. But setting the Appendable Period to Infinite doesn't seem to result in an appendable tape.

Am I'm thinking about this incorrectly? Is there some other setting I'm missing? This would seem to be commonly desired way for incrementals to work, yes?

[Sharvari_Deshmu]

Hello,


Please let us know whether the last post has helped you resolve the issue and revert back if you have any other questions.

Thanks,

NOTE : If we do not receive your reply within two business days, this post would be marked assumed answered and would be moved to answered questions pool.

[Ken_Putnam]

One other thing about Append. The job must specify the same media set that the "Appendable" tape belongs to.

if you have two Media Sets - Full and INCR, and write the Full jobs to the FULL media set, and the INCR jobs to the INCR media set, the INCR job will complain about "no appendable media found " if only a FULL tape is mounted

[Dav_Banks]

I'm with you there. The Incremental job is assigned to the Incremental Media Set which has an OPP of 1 week and an infinite Apendable Period.

With one incremental done on one tape, I'm within both the OPP and AP. The next Incremental job doesn't write to the first tape but loads a new tape.

[Gauri_Ketkar]

Hi,

Following Technotes will be helpful

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/237374.htm
http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/192265.htm


Update us on the same and revert for any further Query
Hope this will help you


Thank you
Gauri

[Dav_Banks]

Thanks. The question remains, however, why doesn't it work?

[Ken_Putnam]

Forgive a silly question, but the INCR job does specify "Append, Else Overwrite", correct?

If it is set for Overwrite Only, then the behavior you are experiencing is to be expected, but if set for Append, Else Overwrite, should OverWrite the week's first INCR, then append the rest of the week

[Dav_Banks]

Not a silly question at all!

I had initially set it up that way but in the process of tinkering with it I must have set it to Overwrite Only.

Upon resetting to Append -> Overwrite, it's working as expected!

Thanks much!!!