Weekly Media set rotation; best practices?

[BillClark]

I have an HP autloader (1 drive, 8 bays) and I have the following setup:  Bays 1-6 are tapes labeled M-F with the 6th tape being a spare (I have 4 sets, 1 for each week).  Bay 7 holds a Monthly tape, and Bay 8 holds a cleaning cartridge.  I need guidance in how best to setup my media sets for this type of a rotation.  I do a full backup of my data every night and have plenty of room availabe on a single tape, but I would like it setup to append to the "spare" tape if needed.  I will manually run the Monthly tape on a weekend close to the end of the month.  Can anyone guide me in the setup of this?  Thanks.

Bill

[Ken_Putnam]

Do you always want Monday to go to slot 1, for example?  if so you can partition the library, but I don't think you can assign the same slot to more than one  partition, so would not be able to use the 6th for overflow/growth

if you want to do this, partition the loader (Slot1 = Monday, Slot2 = Tuesday etc).  You would need 5 separate jobs, each pointed at the associated partition

Instead, create one Daily job, Overwrite, media set "Daily" with an OPP of 6 days, App of 0 (never append).

The first week, load one tape the first night, a second the next, etc in the appropriate slot.  When you start the second week, load the overflow tape

Only load the Monthly tape the first time you run a monthly job

For the Monthly, create a job, Overwrite, media set "Monthly" OPP of 27 days, APP of 0 again

Tools\Options\Media Management

Select either Full or Partial

Select "Use Overwriteable media in target media set before scratch medla"

point both jobs to the "All Pools" media pool rather than to specific slots

remember, too,  that when a job spans to a second tape, it will only accept Overwriteable media, so if/when you start to overflow, you will need more than one overflow tape

Message Edited by Ken Putnam on 03-27-2008 01:23 PM

[BillClark]

Well, I WAS thinking I wanted Monday nights backup to always goto slot 1 where a "Monday-SetX" tape would always be.  That way if someone said "I need FileX restored from last Wednesday"  I wouldn't have to load all 5 tapes from that week, only the "Wednesday" tape.  I really want to be able to load all the tapes for the week on Monday morning instead of feeding tapes each night.  What if we ditched the "spare" idea?  With minimal compression I have plenty of room on each tape to hold an entire evenings backup. 

Let me see if I understand this scenario then.  I assign my M-F tapes to a single media set with an OPP of 6 days but allow append immediately.  I load all 5 M-F tapes for that week in the morning(monday), at night when the job kicks in it will take the first tape in slot1 and Overwrite it with data from that backup job.  Next night when the backup kicks in, WILL it start appending data to the end of the first tape or does it start with the tape in slot2 since it is the next tape in the media set? OR, does it not append/overwrite at all?  If it will append with the slot2 tape, then I guess the proper labeling of my tapes should be "Week 1 - Tape1" instead of "Week1 - Monday".  Thanks for your help.

Bill

[Ken_Putnam]

You would only have to load one tape at a time the first six days of each rotation, after that the combination of "reuse overwritable", and the OPPs would use the 5 nightly tapes in the same order

If you want each night on a separate tape, you would not use APPEND, since it willl begin writing on unused space at the end of last night's tape

The only way to guarantee that Monday's tapes are in Slot1, etc is to use partitions, with one job per night pointed at the associated partition, but  you can get close with no partitions and one Overwrite job, once each tape has been used once