GFS - Daily tape assignment

[EdNewman]

Hi All, we have just begun to look at moving our tape backup jobs from a GFS job + an incremental job to having it all included within the GFS job and I have a question with regards to tape usage within a GFS job.

We have a bunch of old LTO4 tapes that we use for our incremental job and then we use LTO5 for GFS jobs, when we merge the incremental into the GFS I want to ensure we still only use the LTO4's for incremental and want to check if this is possible.

My thinking was.
1. create a new GFS pool.
2. Add all the LTO4's to the "Tapes" section of this pool, and leave the "Add tapes from Free media..." ticked.
3. On GFS Media Set page - Advanced - Daily, add all the LTO4's to this page and UNtick the "add tapes from media pool automatically"
4. For all other jobs on GFS Media Set page - Advanced (weekly, monthly etc), don't add any tapes and leave the "add tapes from media pool automatically" ticked.

Will this give me the result of the incremental tapes only using the LTO4 tapes and all other jobs taking tapes from the "free media" pool?

Thanks in advance,
Ed

[Dima P.]

Hello Ed,

Thank you for your question. Mind me asking what library is assigned to your GFS media pool (is it capable of processing both LTO4 and LTO5 tapes)? Thank you!

[EdNewman]

Thanks for your reply. The library is a four drive quantum library and yes it can read/write lto4 and 5 tapes. We currently do backups similar to the above but use a none gsf pool that allows us to use a different pool for the incremental and full parts of the job.

Thanks
Ed.

[Dima P.]

Hello Ed,

If drives can read/write both generations that should work. Cheers!