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bickyz's avatar
bickyz
Level 4
13 years ago

why my weekly backup took tapes from daily media sets slots

Some how my weekly full backup took tapes from daily media sets.

my daily incremental has 4 tapes which are in Daily media sets. Daily media sets has OPP 1 week and Append Period 0 hours.

weekly has 2 tapes which are in Weekly media sets. Weekly media sets has OPP 5 weeks and Append Period Infinite Allow Append.

Daily Incremental job is pointed to daily media set and weekly full job is pointed to weekly media set.

Every friday I remove last week's full backup 2 tapes and replace it with another 2 tapes.

So basically I have 5 set of tapes of 5 weeks. (Tape labelling is bit weird)
Week 1 - WEEK 1A WEEK 2A
Week 2 - WEEK 1B WEEK 2B
Week 3 - WEEK 1C WEEK 2C
Week 4 - WEEK 1D WEEK 2D
Week 5 - WEEK 1E WEEK 2E

Yesterday before backup started tapes labelled Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday were in Daily Media Sets and Week 1A & Week 2A tapes were in Weekly Media Sets so when full backup started it took first tape Week 1A from weekly media set and processed the backup until tape is full. Now rather than using the second tape Week 2A from weekly media sets, it took tapes labelled Tuesday from Daily media sets and continued the backup on this tape and i can see that it has automatically been moved to Weekly media set. I find it strange, can someone please help me on this.

thank you


2010
Backing Up
Backup and Recovery
Backup Exec

5 Replies

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  • AmolB's avatar
    AmolB
    Moderator
    13 years ago

    I would leave it to BE to pick up tapes, If you want specific tapes to be used for daily and weekly

    backups then consider partitioning the library.

  • pkh's avatar
    pkh
    Moderator
    13 years ago

    Your problem is due to the fact that the OPP is calculated from the END of the last job that writes to the tape.  You have to cater for this and set your OPP accordingly.

    Let's say, you have a daily job starting at 10 p.m. and ending at 11 p.m. Your OPP is set to 1 day.  When Mondays job finished writing to the tape at 11 p.m. on Monday, the tape is protected until 11 p.m. on Tuesday.  When the Tuesday job starts at 10 p.m., the tape is still not overwriteable and it would have to use another tape.

    In your case, you should set the OPP of your weekly tape to 4 weeks and the OPP for your daily tape to 6 days.

    Setting OPP can be a bit tricky.  Do familiarise yourself with the Managing your data section of the Admin Guide.

  • bickyz's avatar
    bickyz
    Level 4
    13 years ago

    @pkh thanks I will try this.

    @amolzerocoool thanks i will read the docs on partioning and implement if possible

  • pkh's avatar
    pkh
    Moderator
    13 years ago

    You should not partition your library if you can help it.  If you had patitioned your library to separate your daily and weekly tape, your job, described above, would have failed because BE would be unable to grab a daily tape as it is in another partition.

    I am not a fan of partitioning because it restricts the way BE works and I have not encounetered a situation that I absolutely need it.  If you got your OPP wrong, partitioning only compounds the problem, not help it.

  • Colin_Weaver's avatar
    Colin_Weaver
    Moderator
    13 years ago

    If you are going to partition your library into dspecific days then you should use a different job for each day to avoid the situation mentionend by pkh

    Note this is no "Must do this way" answer to your query as Partitioning with separate jobs OR sorting out your media overwrite and append periods can both achive the similar requirements and both have positives and negatives. So understand and possibly test both and then decided on which one is best for you.