Creating Backup Policy

[girishnair1984]

Hi

We are using Netbackup 7.5 with standalone drive( 2 tapes) . We would like to create 4 policies for each different clients machine. Each policy has daily ( Retention= 1month), weekly(Retention=3months), monthly(Retention= 6months) schedules . 

Is possible to have policy with retention of 1 month & 3 months to use tape1 for backup purpose and policy with retention of 6 months to use tape2 for backup purpose.

What's the best way to label this tape for future reference purpose

Regards

G.N

[Genericus]

Yes you can, but NO you should not.

YES, It is entirely possible to update your master to allow mix retention on tapes, but this is NOT recommended.

You can set the various schedules to use different pools, so they will use the correct tapes.

NO - you really do not want to set your environment up this way. Do you not have someone available to load tapes? If you do not unload tapes, you run the risk of losing multiple days worth of data if a cart is destroyed or stolen.

[Marianne · Accepted solution]

Are you saying that you ONLY have 2 tapes to use for backups? 
To backup 4 clients to? With how much data on each client? 

Do you not expect the tapes to fill up at some point?
And then to be kept for 3 months and 6 months repectively during which the tapes cannot be overwritten?

As per previous excellent reply - it is NOT a good idea to mix retentions on tape. 
At some point the data on tape will look something like this:
(Weekly = W ; Client1 = C1; Client2 = C2; Daily = D, etc...)

BOT | WC1 | WC2 | WC3 | WC4 | DC1 | DC2 | D.. | D... | D... | D... | W... | W... | EOM

At some point, the Daily backups will start to expire, but the Weekly backups not.
Because of the linear way in which tapes are written, the space used by daily backups cannot be reclaimed or overwritten. 
Only when ALL backups on the tapes have expired can the tape be overwritten from the beginning. 

Please also have a look at this blog and subsequent comments:

https://vox.veritas.com/t5/Backup-Recovery-Community-Blog/Understanding-how-NetBackup-writes-to-a-ta...