incremental to tape setup help needed

[bzooz1]

support id: 01838154

We had our plans setup previously, and they had been satisfying our requirements for the previous 1.5 years. Due to a change in tape behavior from v8 to v9, we now need assistance in setting up our plans.

We have the following tape requirements: each nights tape needs to be taken offsite; both our weekly fulls and daily incrementals must be kept to match our disk plan restore points, currently 23

We have only 1 tape for Mon, 1 for Tue, 1 for Wed, 1 for Thurs. We have 6 weekly tapes for our Friday Full backups.

Support and I discussed this option: 1) disk plan for Fri vbk, and backup to tape plan to copy that vbk to our Weekly Full media pool that contains 6 tapes; this disk plan will be set to run on Friday's only, thus only performing full backups

2) a second disk plan that is set to create an active full backup once/year, or once every 3 or 4 months; that way each daily tape (M-Th) only needs to initially copy the most recent vbk to start the chain when the tape plan is first run, then will copy the successive vibs during the week, and won't need to then copy the latest Friday vbk again, which results in the tape being full and forced to be rewritten (we need to keep the disk restore point number of vibs on these daily tapes)

Support was thinking that this may not work because even if we specifically state when an active full is created, Veeam will want to create a synthetic full before the set time, thus causing an issue.

In summary, we need to have 23 restore points available which is covered by the combination of weekly vbks, and the daily vibs, which are take offsite daily. Thank you very much.

[veremin]

Am I right in summarizing your scenario or I'm missing something:

- You have a backup job that uses forward incremental with periodic full mode and runs on daily basis.
- The backup job creates increments on all days, except on Friday
- The backup job creates a full backup on Friday

- Friday full backup should be preserved on tapes for 6 weeks
- Daily increments should be preserved on tapes for 7 days

Thanks.

[bzooz1]

I currently have a setup that is different than the possible solution I first posted, but my current setup is wrong and doesn't satisfy us. I can post my current setup if you want however.

All of your summarizations are correct on how we originally had our plans, except we need to keep the daily incrementals on the M-Th daily tapes for the 23 restore points also. I made changes to the plans due to how v9 changed media set behavior per Support. However the current setup is not working because of the issue where the daily incremental tapes are still wanting to copy the latest Friday vbk, thus filling the tape.

Therefore I thought the #1 & #2 entry above may satisfy our needs, but the issue of the intermittent synthetic full (per Support) required may result in it not working for us. We need to take each daily tape offsite each day.

[bzooz1]

I would like to add how we originally had our plans in v8, which worked for us well.

-1 disk plan that ran incrementals M-Th, and a full on Friday; 23 restore points
-1 backup to tape plan that copied the M-Th incrementals to 1 media pool containing the M-Th tapes (4 tapes only), and copied the Friday full to a second media pool containing 6 weekly tapes; Weekly pool set to: create new media set every backup session, and do not protect...; daily M-Th pool set to: do not create..., and do not protect

After upgrading to v9, when the daily Monday tape, for example, would eject after copying that nights incremental, the media set would close, and then when that Monday tape was used again, it would create a new media set, thus erasing the tape. This of course would happen for Tue, Wed, Thur as well. In v8 a new media set wasn't being created as per the setting in the pool, in v9 it was. This is why we had to change our plans.

[veremin]

Let me clarify few more things before recommending anything to you:

- You're using standalone drive, aren't you?
- Are you saying that in version 8 with the given media pool settings you had only one mediaset that wasn't broken each time you ejected/inserted a new daily tape, and backup server was able to append data to already written media after one week?

Thanks.

[bzooz1]

-standalone drive - yes

With our previous setup, we imported 4 new tapes into the "daily incremental" pool. When the Monday tape was first used, it created a new media set. When the Tues tape was first used it created a new media set. Same thing for Wed and Thurs. So we did have 4 media sets in that one pool. When the Monday tape was used the next Monday, it did not create a new media set, it just copied that Monday's vib to that tape, and all was well. Same thing for Tue-Thur tapes. I had multiple Monday vibs on the Monday tape, same for Tue-Thur tapes.

Then after upgrading to v9, that night we ran the incremental, and that night's tape created a new media set. I started a support case on that issue and they said that the new behavior was correct due to the way v9 changed tape logic.

[Dima P.]

Hi bzooz1,

Thanks for the heads up. It looks like you faced some ‘logical bug’ in v8. VBR kept only one opened media set per media pool, since tape support was introduced: if the last tape from the media set is not present by the time tape job kicks in, new media set is opened.

Same behavior in correct version, with one correction – we allow to keep multiple media sets when parallel processing is enabled (one media set per drive).

[bzooz1]

Thanks for the reply. Does my potential plan setup stated in my initial post pose any issues, specifically synthetic fulls being created when active fulls are selected to run 3 or 4 times per year, instead of weekly or monthly? Thanks.

[Dima P.]

You are welcome. Have you ever considered using GFS media pool for your full backups long term archiving? You could keep weekly, monthly and yearly fulls in GFS media pool and use a simple media pool fto archive your daily backups if needed?

[bzooz1]

I may be mistaken, but I believe I am using a simple plan for our weekly full backups, and daily incrementals. Our constraining variable it that we need to take the M-Th daily incrementals offsite each night.

But again, my first post may be a workable solution, as long as only running an active full on our #2 plan only 3 or 4 times per year doesn't cause an issue, which support thought it might, because the chain would become to large. What is your thought on that?

[bzooz1]

I have decided against using the above plan type. We are instead using 6 weekly tapes that perform a full on friday, and incrementals on M-Th; Week 1 tape will be used from Friday-Thurs; then Week 2 tape, etc. This does allow us to take the tape offsite each night after the incremental, and satisfies retention. It doesn't allow us to use a Monday incremental tape for incrementals only, Tues tape for Tuesday incrementals, etc, but it seems we now are not required to do that. Thank you for the help. I will paste this post on a second thread I have been commenting on.