GFS Tape Jobs and Synthetic Backups

[Kyles]

Hello everyone,

Question about best practice for synthetic full backups and GFS tape jobs. At the moment I have backup jobs which create a weekly synthetic full backups on 1800hrs each Friday (Incremental Monday-Thursday). With a GFS backup job to backup those jobs to tape running Saturday midnight (weekly/monthly).

This works well but the tape backup job reports No GFS candidate for Weekly media set was found for today, waiting, followed by No restore points found for <date> . Synthesized full backup was not created because the most recent restore point is a full backup. Then the last full backup job is successfully written to tape 24hrs or so later.

Would it more efficient to turn off the generation of a full synthetic in the backup job properties. Turning it into a forever forward incremental backup and let the tape job generate the synthetics? (presumably the end result would be the same i.e. an incremental chain with a weekly full synthetic)

[Dima P.]

Hello Kirk.

Would it more efficient to turn off the generation of a full synthetic in the backup job properties. Turning it into a forever forward incremental backup and let the tape job generate the synthetics? (presumably the end result would be the same i.e. an incremental chain with a weekly full synthetic)

Sounds reasonable if you don't have a strict policy to keep an extra full on disk storage. Moreover, such approach will save you some disk storage.

[Kyles]

Hi Dmitry,

Thanks for the quick response. I think I understand now- so in the case of the GFS backup job creating the full synthetic backup, once written to tape it will be removed from disk. Leaving the forever forward incremental chain on disk.

[veremin]

Actually, nothing will be created on disk - GFS restore point will be directly synthesized on tapes. More information can be found here. Thanks.