Discussions related to exporting backups to tape and backing up directly to tape.
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athome
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Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly scheduele

Post by athome »

Hi!

With the introduction of tape support in v7. I would like to run copy to tape each sunday.

The first sunday in the month it should copy to an monthly pool, while on sundays for the rest of the month, it should copy to another pool.

How do I configure this? there is no possiblibity to use exclude dates.

Its seems to me that either way I configure it.. it will one week run both of the jobs.

A
veremin
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Re: Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly schedu

Post by veremin »

Hi, Anders. From my perspective, two jobs (monthly, weekly) pointed to different media-pools should do the trick. Thanks.
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Re: Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly schedu

Post by athome »

But still, whether I choose the first or last Sunday of month backup, I will end up with the job goes double one Sunday per month.
veremin
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Re: Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly schedu

Post by veremin »

Then, you can write a simple PS script that will enable/disable a given tape job and schedule this script (Task Scheduler) to run on first Sunday only.

Disable:

Code: Select all

asnp VeeamPSSNapin
$TapeJob = Get-VBRTapeJob -name "Name of tape job"
$TapeJob.DisableScheduler()
Enable:

Code: Select all

asnp VeeamPSSNapin
$TapeJob = Get-VBRTapeJob -name "Name of tape job"
$TapeJob.EnableScheduler() 
Thanks.
Dima P.
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Re: Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly schedu

Post by Dima P. »

Anders,

I could also suggest changing tape retention on both media pools - one as a shot term, another as a long term. For example: 1 year for tapes with last Sunday of month backup and 1 month weekly backup tapes. Weekly tapes will be overwritten each month so you would keep only last Sunday backups for a year.
athome
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Re: Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly schedu

Post by athome »

Hi!

Thanks for swift replies from both of you. Both could be workarounds. And we will consider implementing this.

Veeam Backup & Replication is really getting a better and better backupsoftware.. but to compete against Netbackup, Networker and the larger and more established competitors.. the scheduler is one thing that can have its improvements.. maybe the option to introduce policies is the way to go?
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Re: Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly schedu

Post by Dima P. »

Anders,

Thank you for the kind words. I am not sure that this would be polices, but tape functionality would be definitely improved in the upcoming versions.
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Re: Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly schedu

Post by nunciate »

Here is what I did with my setup. I did this because I have 4 tape drives and want to utilize them all at the same time if possible. Since you can only run 1 job at a time per media pool and thus use only 1 tape drive at a time per media pool I setup my environment like this.
Created 4 Weekly Media pools set retention as 1 Month. Set create new Media set at 6:00am only on Fridays. My weekly backups start to tape start on Friday morning and go through Saturday afternoon usually so I want all tapes to use the same media set over that time period.

Created 4 Daily Media pool set retention to 1 Week. Set create new Media set at 6:00am Tuesday-Friday. My dailys incrementals run every night and sometimes on Friday nights depending on if the full ran early in the day on Friday. This keeps my incrementals for 1 week. If they happen to run on Friday night the same tape/media set is used on the Monday night incremental. Saves tapes.

Manually load balance/schedule all of my jobs across the multiple media pools. Had to check start/end times to determine best mix so that I had less idle time on each drive. daily's run quick so no big deal there but weeklies take a while so that is why I load balance the jobs.

Now for monthly and yearly backups.
Created 1 Monthly Pool with a retention of 3 years and 1 yearly with Never Overwrite. Did not create new media set on both of these as it doesn't matter because it will use the media set created during the weekly backups.

So on the first Friday of every month I let my backups run over the weekend. When I come in on Monday I move the weekly those backup tapes to my Monthly pool. Usually about 10 tapes. I then do a catalog tape job on each one. takes about an hour. That gets my data back into the catalog. Then I export the tapes and send them offsite. Same for yearly tapes.

I leave my weekly and daily tapes where they are and let them expire normally. This has been the easiest way to manage my tapes that I have found so far. If someone has some other way that is less work I would love to hear about it. Hopeing they produce a patch that will allow for monthly and yearly retentions as well as the ability to run multiple jobs on a single media pool.
athome
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Re: Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly schedu

Post by athome »

Dima P. wrote:Anders,

Thank you for the kind words. I am not sure that this would be polices, but tape functionality would be definitely improved in the upcoming versions.
Any update on how this works in V8? we have a quite large environment with StoreOnce so creating virtual fullbackup to tape is not an option. I see that in the scheduler you have the option with ie. first second saturday pr month.. but with no option to exclude.

A
veremin
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Re: Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly schedu

Post by veremin »

Just a quick question - do you want this type of schedule to have GFS on tapes? Thanks.
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Re: Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly schedu

Post by athome »

Well on tapes we only want fullbackups so its more like GF i guess :-)
veremin
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Re: Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly schedu

Post by veremin »

Then, you'll be glad to hear that we're working on delivering proper GFS retention on tapes in version 9. So, not only would your goal be achieved, but also usage of complex type of schedule would not be required any longer. Thanks.
athome
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Re: Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly schedu

Post by athome »

v.Eremin wrote:Then, you'll be glad to hear that we're working on delivering proper GFS retention on tapes in version 9. So, not only would your goal be achieved, but also usage of complex type of schedule would not be required any longer. Thanks.
Ahh.. great to hear.. I guess v9 is scheduled for end of the year or something?

Any suggestion on how to workaround this until then? this environment is quite large so the copyjobs to tape takes up to 60 hours(4 x LTO-drives).. but I guess.. we COULD try to schedule a job for a dedicated monthly-pool starting after the weekly have been running. one option could maybe to do as nunciate mentioned earlier in this thread (not certain that I understood the part of running the "catalog tape" of it though):
nunciate wrote:Now for monthly and yearly backups.
Created 1 Monthly Pool with a retention of 3 years and 1 yearly with Never Overwrite. Did not create new media set on both of these as it doesn't matter because it will use the media set created during the weekly backups.
So on the first Friday of every month I let my backups run over the weekend. When I come in on Monday I move the weekly those backup tapes to my Monthly pool. Usually about 10 tapes. I then do a catalog tape job on each one. takes about an hour. That gets my data back into the catalog. Then I export the tapes and send them offsite. Same for yearly tapes

A
veremin
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Re: Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly schedu

Post by veremin »

Ahh.. great to hear.. I guess v9 is scheduled for end of the year or something?
Unfortunately, we cannot provide any ETA at the moment.
we COULD try to schedule a job for a dedicated monthly-pool starting after the weekly have been running. one option could maybe to do as nunciate mentioned earlier in this thread (not certain that I understood the part of running the "catalog tape" of it though):
I assume he is talking about moving written tapes to a different media pool and cataloguing them afterwards (right-click on medium -> Catalogue). It might be a workaround, though I think usage of combination of dedicated job and dedicated media pool is a better option.

Not sure whether it's likely to work, but you can try to add pre-command to a weekly job that will check whether or a weekly or monthly job should be started on that day and start the required one accordingly.

Thanks.
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Re: Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly schedu

Post by DChiavari » 1 person likes this post

Just in case anyone needs this (while waiting for v9), here is an updated script that will work with v8 (thank you Vladimir).

If you have the word "weekly" in your job names, you can disable/enable them all at once with this code:

DISABLE

Code: Select all

asnp VeeamPSSNapin
$TapeJobs = Get-VBRTapeJob | ? {$_.Name -Like "*weekly*"}
Disable-VBRJob -Job $TapeJobs
ENABLE

Code: Select all

asnp VeeamPSSNapin
$TapeJobs = Get-VBRTapeJob | ? {$_.Name -Like "*weekly*"}
Enable-VBRJob -Job $TapeJobs
For example, if you have weekly jobs to tape on Friday and a monthly job on the last Friday of the month, you could schedule the Disable script to run on the last friday of the month and the Enable script on the first day of the month.
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nunciate
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Re: Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly schedu

Post by nunciate »

I don't re-catalogue my tapes anymore. It became harder and harder as I added more backups. I have a lot of jobs now and a lot of full tapes at the end of the weekend.

What I do now is the day before my monthly backups to tape begin I edit every tape job and manually change the media pool to the Monthly pools. Then when the weekend is over I move them back to weekly pools for the next 3 weeks.
It is a super pain in the backside but it is really the easiest way to do it.

I attempted to use the following powershell command for each of the jobs but this breaks the jobs. I generated a command for each of my 70 tape jobs to move them to Monthly pools and then another set to move them back to Weekly.
I have my jobs chained together. I have 1 jobs for each media pool scheduled to start at 10:00pm nightly. Then every other job in each media pool is chained to the first ones.
When I ran this command it removed all of my scheduling options and defaulted and I had to go in and re-chain everything manually.

Hopefully the v9 updates will help with all of this.

Set-VBRBackupToTapeJob -Job "NAME OF TAPE JOB" -FullBackupMediaPool "NAME OF MEDIA POOL"
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Re: Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly schedu

Post by FTBZ »

I've a similar question. We have configured a GFS to tapes and I want to know when a monthly backup was done and on which tape names. When getting the email notification, we don't know if it's a monthly or weekly job. Our monthly tapes need to be stored in a vault.

There is a way to differentiate this on email notification?
veremin
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Re: Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly schedu

Post by veremin »

You're correct. Information regarding used tapes is there, but information regarding type of GFS cycle is missing.

Sounds like a valid feature request to me.

Thanks.
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Re: Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly schedu

Post by FTBZ »

v.Eremin wrote: Sounds like a valid feature request to me.
Thanks! I will check the API to gather this information.
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Re: Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly schedu

Post by FTBZ »

I didn't find a way to extract GFS or tape job informations from API, I'm wrong or it's not possible?
veremin
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Re: Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly schedu

Post by veremin » 1 person likes this post

Information regarding tapes is not exposed via RESTful APIs. If you're talking about PowerShell instead, kindly, create a separate topic in PS subforum and explain your request there - we'll see what can be done in this regard. Thanks.
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Re: Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly schedu

Post by FTBZ »

Thanks, but no I was talking about the RESTful APIs.
veremin
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Re: Copy to tape how to differentiate on month/weekly schedu

Post by veremin »

We tend to keep RESTful API functionality similar to functionality of Enterprise Manager, and within the latter hardly will you find GFS mediaset references. Thanks.
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