Weekly and Montly tape job with INCs and FULL

[TomBlue]

Hello all!
We got a 24 tape library with one tapedrive for offloading backups to another location. We've planned to do 3 stages:

1) Daily to Disk with forward forever strategy
2) Weekly to Tape, job runs every day after the disk backup. The tape goes to the external location on Tuesday. So we've configured to do a Synthetic full to tape on every Wednesday. Our goal is to have Wednesday a Full and all succeeding day as incremental on the tape also. So we can restore every single day with just this backup media.
3) Monthly to Tape, job runs every day after the weekly 2 tape job. The strategy is similar to the weekly job: the tape is removed on first Tuesday every month. So we created a job doing a synthetic full on first Wednesday every month, all succeeding backups should be incrementals.

Stage (1) and (2) are working fine. We just have a problem with the monthly stage (3): This job produces synthetic full backups every day and is ignoring the configured schedule. Both tape jobs are configured the same way, except of different schedule for the syth full, of course. Both jobs are using the Daily disk backup as source. The main schedule is differnt though, the weekly job is configured to run diretly after the daily job, the monthly job is scheduled for 10:00 AM. This we have done to circumvent problems with tape ejection form the drive if both jhobs runs on the same main schedule.

Is it possible that the jobs are influencing each other?
Is there another way to configure something like GFS but with having one full and succedding daily incrementals on the tape?

With the built in GFS I wasn't successfull with creating the incrementals. I guess, I do not see the easy solution for this problem.

Cheers,
Thomas

[Dima P.]

Hello Thomas,

Is there another way to configure something like GFS but with having one full and succedding daily incrementals on the tape?

GFS Media pool does not support incremental, so you approach sounds like a good workaround.

monthly stage (3): This job produces synthetic full backups every day and is ignoring the configured schedule.

Are you using a single media pool for both weekly and monthly jobs? Please clarify how media set creation is configured in this monthly media pool? How retention is configured on the source disk job (i.e. how many restore points to keep)? Thanks.

[TomBlue]

Hi Dima!

Thx for your quick answer.

I've configured separate media pools for the jobs, but both jobs are using the configured media pool for full and incrementals. The weekly pool has a retention time of 4 weeks, the monthly pool of 50 weeks. The source disk job (Forward forever) is configured to hold 60 restore points and runs once a day.

Is it possible that the change of main job strategy is possibly the cause of my issue? For disk backup we changed strategy from reverse incremental to forward incremental on July 13th. So our actual full is from this day. There are still some reverse incrementals before this date and the daily forward incrementals created since that date.

Thx
Thomas

[daveuu]

Hi Tom, I am also looking to run GFS (Weekly, Monthly and Yearly) and daily incremental. I have three job types, Daily Incremental to disk (I have multiple daily to disk but does not matter), Daily Tape, Weekly GFS Tape:
- Daily Monday to Saturday forward incremental to disk, synthetic full on Saturday (Synth full not required from a tape perspective as GFS will create a synthetic full to tape)
- Daily backup to tape with a filter for *.vib and *.vmb running Mon - Friday in a standard Media Pool. No full backup scheduled after the initial full.
- GFS on Saturdays to tape in GFS Media Pool.
The main limitation is the restore from tape (with GFS + Incremental) is a manual three step - Restore the GFS to Disk, restore the incrementals to disk, Import the backups. I have tested this with synthetic GFS and standard incrementals and it seems to work.

Just about to go live with this configuration this week so hopefully will work out ok..


Dave