Feature request - Active fulls and Synthetic full to tape

[JaySt]

I had a case open with support regarding not being able to do daily (synthetic / virtual)full to tape.
As it seems, this cannot work when you have periodic active fulls or synthetic fulls scheduled on your primary backup job. The primary backup job has to be forever forward incremental.
When active/synth full is scheduled and the tape job runs and is configured to only create full backups on tape, it will not copy any restore point to tape other than full (.vbks) created by the primary job.

I'd like to use active full (weekly) together with the ability to do only (virtual) fulls to tape as well. i don't like the idea of being forced to forever forward incremental (with possible merge performance issues) just because i only want full backups on tape.

[veremin]

Currently, that is by design behaviour. Additional alternative might be reversed incremental mode where the latest restore point is always a full backup which will be archived to tapes on daily basis. Thanks.

[JaySt]

i could have a look at that, being weekly active full and reverse daily incremental.

[veremin]

Good. By the way, active full schedule can be even less strict. Say, once a month or so would be OK. Thanks.

[hgrams]

1 next point to this function

I'd still like to see a possibility, although active fulls are performed once a month and the Forward Incremental mode is that a synthetic full can be performed weekly on tape.

I am also not quite clear what the problem is? If I have a Forever Forward Incremental chain that is 30 RPs long and I generate a synthetic full of it 1x per week for copying to tape or I generate 1x per month an Active Full plus N incremenals from which the synthetic full must be calculated. Doesn't make that much difference to me from the point of view of a programming algorithm.

This would give you more possibilities to respond to customer wishes without having to break a leg with any workaraound.

[Dima P.]

Harald,

Any chance you've checked GFS tape jobs? It creates full backup for weekly/monthly/yearly at the set day for any source job (or write full to tape if it exists for the needed date on disk). Thanks!

[hgrams]

Hi Dimitry,

Thanks for the hint. I know that works, but several customers want to copy VMs AND file shares to tape. Unfortunately I cannot use GFS mediapool for file shares. For resource reasons regarding the number of tapes and copy run times, the use of only one media pool is useful or necessary.

[Dima P.]

For file shares your customers currently use file to tape jobs, right?

[hgrams]

Yes, they do.

[Dima P.]

With file to tape jobs we don't use synthetics at all and active full backup can be configured via file to tape job properties (such job run will read all file versions from the source at the set dates).

Can I read your request to support the GFS media pool as a target for file to tape jobs as well or combination of synthetic fulls & active fulls in the regular tape job is required as well? Cheers!

[hgrams]

I'd prefer the support of the GFS media pool as a target for file to tape jobs as well.