Discussions related to exporting backups to tape and backing up directly to tape.
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redhorse
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Tape Schedule for Full Backup

Post by redhorse »

Hello,

I am struggling with the configuration for a non-GFS backup-to-tape job as I don't know how to achieve my requirements. The source backup jobs are forever-incremental backup and backup-copy jobs, so there is no periodical active or synthetic full in the backup chain.

We'd like to have a weekly full on tape with the restore points of Friday and a daily incremental on the other days. Therefor I've scheduled the tape job to run daily at 4 am and the virtual full on Friday.

Now I've noticed that on Friday morning the tape job couldn't find a restore point for Friday and used the most recent restore point (Thursday) for the tape job, but that doesn't fit to my needs. I'd expected that the tape job waits until a Friday restore point is created to store it on tape.

Before we activated the daily incremental I could achieve this by scheduling the job to run once a week on Sunday and it used the restore point for Friday as it was configured for the virtual full.

Is there a chance to get things working as I need?

Thanks
lyapkost
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Re: Tape Schedule for Full Backup

Post by lyapkost »

Hi. Seems that your source jobs are scheduled to run after 4 AM so the tape jobs takes previous points from Thursday and creates a virtual full. All you need to do (and it's quite obviuos from your story) is to schedule tape virtual full on Saturday, so the job will create it from Friday's point on early Saturday morning. Or if you want to have full points on tape on Friday (not on early Saturday morning), you need to schedule it later on Friday after all source jobs finish. Or consider using GFS media pool instead of a standard one.
redhorse
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Re: Tape Schedule for Full Backup

Post by redhorse »

Hi,

yes that was also my conclusion, I should either change the virtual full on Saturday or schedule the job later which is quite complicated as the jobs run until midnight.

So, if I change the virtual full to Saturday Veeam will use the restore points from Friday but if there are new restore points from the source jobs on Saturday while the tape job is still running, they might be stored to tape. The consequence would be a set of mixed restore points from Friday and Saturday, am I right?

How can a GFS help me to avoid this issue?
lyapkost
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Re: Tape Schedule for Full Backup

Post by lyapkost » 1 person likes this post

The consequence would be a set of mixed restore points from Friday and Saturday, am I right?
A restore point which had been created on Friday is considered as a Friday restore point even if the corresponding job finished later on Saturday. A tape job waits until the source job finishes and copies these points/full from them. So I don't expect any issues here unless some of your source jobs start between 12:00 AM and 4:00 AM in which case you'll have mix on tape (fulls from Saturday points of these jobs and from Friday points of other jobs).
How can a GFS help me to avoid this issue?
GFS does exactly what you expect: waits for the source job to create a point on the specific day and tapes this point (itself or full from it according schedule). You may schedule weekly full for Fridays and daily points as well, and disable other media sets.
redhorse
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Re: Tape Schedule for Full Backup

Post by redhorse »

lyapkost wrote: Mar 26, 2021 12:39 pm A restore point which had been created on Friday is considered as a Friday restore point even if the corresponding job finished later on Saturday. A tape job waits until the source job finishes and copies these points/full from them. So I don't expect any issues here unless some of your source jobs start between 12:00 AM and 4:00 AM in which case you'll have mix on tape (fulls from Saturday points of these jobs and from Friday points of other jobs).
Yes, I've understood your point. But if the tape job is still running when the source backups on Saturday are starting, I'd have possibly restore points from Saturday on tape.

But I'll give GFS another change, I had some trouble with it as it didn't work as expected. But I'll try again as it does exactly what I need.
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