Tape Out Month End Behaviour

[SachmoNZ]

Hi there,

We have a backup job that runs Monday to Saturday.
Saturday is a synthetic full.

Additionally, we are copying backups to tape - and the requirement is the month-end tape should be written on the last Calendar day of the month.

The first time this will occur is in January 2021
Saturday 30th Jan 2021 (Weekly full synthetic + Weekly Full GFS Media Set written)
Sunday 31st Jan 2021 ( Monthly GFS to tape should run?)

Does anyone know what will happen?
Saturday night - Synthetic full runs (30th January)
Tape out job runs and writes the full backups to the weekly tape set

Will the tape out job run again on the Sunday - 31st Jan and write out a full backup based on the last backup (Saturday night before) or will it complain that no backups have been written since we wrote the weekly backup out to tape and there's no pending backup sets?

I hope that makes sense?

[VCFP]

Will the tape out job run again on the Sunday - 31st Jan and write out a full backup based on the last backup (Saturday night before) or will it complain that no backups have been written since we wrote the weekly backup out to tape and there's no pending backup sets?

I am not an expert with VB&R but my experience with GFS, when we tried to use it, makes me assume the latter behaviour, doing nothing because all was already written to tape.

As it were, we gave up on the weird implementation of GFS in VB&R ("waiting for something to be written for 24 hours, starting at midnight", if I remember this stuff correctly).

If I start a backup job, I expect it to act like it is configured (like, "make a full backup of the specified machines") and do it EVERY time I hit the start button. And if want to write the data
3 times to disk, it better well does so...
I dislike software that tries to know better what I want than myself and tell my "oh there is nothing to do, I did the full backup already".

[SachmoNZ]

I wonder if i set the Process the Most recent restore ponit (Tape Job > Options > Advanced) that will make it grab the backup from the day before.

Fixes the issue for month end but then every sunday the job will run and re-write saturdays backups even though it did that already.

No perfect answer i guess

[soncscy]

Heya Sachiv,

My experience is that the tape should should write nothing with this setup because:

1. The previous point is already on tape so I think it should not be eligible.
2. Since no new points were made, I think it should just warn nothing was possible.

The good news is that you should be able to work around this by either firing off an out of band backup on that Sunday (full or incremental, should not matter), or I think that tape GFS has its own active-full that you can fire off and pick a media pool even and it will just take the most recent eligible point (if I remember right) I believe that should also meet your needs to just script firing off the full on that sunday.

Out of curiosity, why skip the sunday disk backups?

[Dima P.]

The first time this will occur is in January 2021
Saturday 30th Jan 2021 (Weekly full synthetic + Weekly Full GFS Media Set written)
Sunday 31st Jan 2021 ( Monthly GFS to tape should run?)

That's the setup of a single GFS to tape jobs /GFS media pool, right? You are not using GFS + regular backup to tape jobs? Thanks!