Best Practice for GFS Tapebackup

[dasfliege]

Hi all

We are running a quite big backup environement for one of our customers and we always have problems with GFS to Tape jobs. During the latest case with veeam support, i was asked why we use CopyJobs as the source for our GFS-to-Tape jobs, even though it is written in the manual that you should not do that: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... tml?ver=95
I tried to explain that during a Tape-Backup, the source files are locked. So if we take normal Backupjobs as the source, we would not be able to execute normal Backups for the duration the Tapejob is running, which is approx 50hours. As we have to make sure, that our customer has restore-points all 2hours, this is not an option at all.

I was wondering how you guys would configure such a scenario!? In my opinion, this is a quite common scenario, if not the most common at all.

Here's the detailed configuration we use:

- Backup to Disk: Monday - Sunday / 06:00 - 20:00 / every 2 hours
- Backup Copy with GFS Retention: Monday - Friday / at 22:00
- GFS Backup to Tape: Monthly at first Saturday of each month at 00:00 / Weekly at 2,3,4,5 Saturday of each month at 00:00

All i want to achive is just, that at saturdays the most recent restore-point is written to tape without interrupting the normal backups.


Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

[Shestakov]

Hi

i was asked why we use CopyJobs as the source for our GFS-to-Tape jobs, even though it is written in the manual that you should not do that

To be correct it`s not recommended to use backup copy jobs with the GFS retention to create a GFS tape archive.
Simple backup copy jobs are fine.

Besides, starting from v9.5 there is an option to postpone the start of the source job if tape one is still running.

Your backup settings look good for me. Do all jobs finish within the backup window?

[dasfliege]

Okay, so its just the GFS retention that causes the troubles. Got it.
But still... If i would like to follow the recommendation to not use GFS CopyJobs as a source and can't use normal Backupjobs as source, as they have to be running all day in a 2h interval, what alternatives do i have? Should i create a second CopyJob without GFS, just to have a proper source for the tape? With a data volume of around 12TB, this would be quite a big overhead.

Yes, the jobs all finish on time, if they don't fail for whatever reason.

[Shestakov]

Your reasoning makes sense.
Actually there is nothing bad in using GFS backup copy jobs as source of GFS tape backup jobs, QA team confirmed that the scenario should work with no issues. The only thing that may be confusing is the fact that GFS full backups of the source job will not be just copied to the tape, but tape will create its own ones.
Thanks!