10-07-2008 07:54 AM
Hello,
We are currently running BE 11d, and backing up to a stand-alone tape device with a single tape drive. We inherrited this setup, would rather have a library of tapes.
My problem is that when the tape gets full it ejects and we need to go the device to put in a new tape.
Is there a setting I can change to allow it to overwrite starting from the beginning of the tape when it gets full, rather than just ejecting and waiting for a new tape?
I thought of changing the setting for the backups to overwrite the media without appending, but thats probably not a good solution as each backup will end up overwriting the previous.
Any suggestions would be great, and please let me know if any more info is needed.
Thanks in advance.
10-07-2008 10:42 AM
My problem is that when the tape gets full it ejects and we need to go the device to put in a new tape.
Is there a setting I can change to allow it to overwrite starting from the beginning of the tape when it gets full, rather than just ejecting and waiting for a new tape?
Nope, if you did that, you'd lose all the data written at the end of the tape
How much can each tape hold? How much is a backup? How many tapes do you have? How long do you want to keep the data?
10-07-2008 10:55 AM
The tapes are 800 GB
The backup sizes are 90 GB daily, and once a week we backup system images totalling about 360 GB
I was able to use 1 tape for a full week, now i am at the beginning of the rotation, 20 tapes total, so i am running into the backups appending to the end of the tape. Not a big deal, except when the tape runs out it ejects and I get failed backups because I cant get to the co-lo to change it right away.
The backups were started at the middle of February, so I am overwriting data that is now almost 8 months old.
I'm thinking 3 week data retention, i can get several days worth of data on1 tape. It's that weekly snapshot that hurts.