Getting daily fulls to tape from Immutable without snap

[dwright1542]

New LTO8 tape drive, large enough to handle fulls daily. We have local immutable storage, incremental with synthetic fulls on Saturday. What's the best way to get full backups to the tape daily? We're just going to have 5 tapes that get overwritten every week.

1. IF we don't do incrementals, we only get the full that was produced on Saturday
2. IF we do incrementals, we only get the incremental on the tape, but not the Saturday full.
3. We do select only process most recent chain under advanced.

[dwright1542]

HM. From a related post, looks like I may need to switch to forward forever incrementals, which I don't really want to do.

[dwright1542]

Bump.

So Veeam tech looked at this with no solution, I had a Veeam suggested partner look at this, no solution. What am I missing here? How can this be so difficult?

[Mildur]

Hi

Theoretically, you could do daily synthetic fulls with the backup job. A daily backup to tape job will then write full backups instead of incremental backups.

With xfs as the filesystem, the daily synthetic full doesn‘t require more storage as an incremental backup.

Thanks
Fabian

[david.domask]

Your point 2 doesn't sound right -- enabling incremental backups doesn't ignore the full, in fact the full is required Did you have a situation where the full wasn't grabbed? If so, this is not expected and needs to be researched.

As for the goal of it must be a full on tape, can I ask, what is the purpose behind the requirement? If you target both the Fulls and Increments to the same media pool, they can reside on the same tape and make your tape recovery very simple (everything on one tape).

[jcalvetm]

Found myself in the same situation

Standalone LTO8 drive -not everybody has a tape charger and LOTS of people are reluctant about cloud storage or not willing to pay for it-.
Full backup on tape every day. We use two sets of tapes (odd and even week - Monday to friday tapes)

The solution we use is:

- Disk jobs with Forever forward incremental backup on disk
- Backup to Tape Job to store backups on tape.

As we need "every tape to contain everything - need to recover with a single tape", in the job tape we programmed a virtual synthetic full backup (Edit tape job - Media Pool - Schedule) on weekdays.

So (summary): Forever forward incremental to disk and then Backup to tape job with virtual synthetic fulls on weekdays.

Only two things:

• As our unit is stand alone, drive must be inventoried on every tape change in order for the tape to be recognised, and erased if necessary -it is in our case-.

• There is a curious thing about scheduling -specially when chained backup jobs exist-: We schedule tape job "as new backups appear". But if date in disk Job backup metadata are not the same as Tape job starting date tape job won't find any backup to be transfered to tape. If your backup job metadata has a "before midnight" date and tape job starts "after midnight", tape job won't find any job to be transfered to tape. This is because I had to schedule disk backups at 00:01 hours.Hope they fix that.

Appart from daily synthetic full to tape, We also schedule incrementals in sat and sun -that go into friday's tape-, but that involves some extra powershell and windows task schedulling.

Hope it helps

[GilesEadon]

Can I also add to this, we have a customer with this exact requirement.

New LTO8 tape loader an onsite immutable XFS repo and another immutable XFS repo offsite. Because they have immutable XFS repo's we must use Forward Incremental backups with a synthetic full on a Sunday. The customer want's to specifically have one tape with that days (or weeks chain on) and take it offsite. It doesn't matter if its a virtual full (appreciate we cannot use this with synthetic fulls) or we get Full, Inc, Inc on the same tape.

We basically have to choose between immutable backups and tape friendly backups, I would prefer the option of using virtual fulls onto tape with forward incremental backups with a weekly synthetic so we can still utilize the Linux XFS hardened repo.

Is there a way this can be achieved?

[jcalvetm]

My opinion:

Maybe adding a non immutable repo as main repo (call it temporal) and configuring both hardened repos and Tape as Secondary Targets.

1 - Forever forward incremental to non-immutable repo.
2 - Tape job with virtual full to tape (Forever forward incremental is mandatory in order to get virtual fulls)
3 - As both hardened repos are configured as secondary targets, backups are moved to hardened storage.

All these operations (backup transport and tape copy) may occur symultaneously.

It all depends on sizes and storage needs, of course (i.e. money). I did this with a USB disk acting as a repo -it was a small business- so if possible and you have one available, cost is minimum, at least to try if the solution works.

Mind timing! : In my case tape job is scheduled "as new backup files appear". But if disk backup date in metadata is different than tape's backup date (example: disk backup before midnight, tape backup after midnight), tape job won't find any job and will not copy to tape.

Maybe there is a better solution for that, but this is what comes to my mind.

Hope it helps