Backup to tape with 6 months of retention

[fspadaro]

Hi to all,

I have a very simple configuration, but I’m not familiar with the backup to tape policies.

5 Backup Job - Forward Forever Incremental
5 Backup Copy Job to Immutable repository

I would like to insert offline backups on LTO6 tape (SAS) to have the retention of 6 months structured as follows:

1 full month, after 2 months I put the A-B tapes in the safe
1 full month, after 2 months I put the C-D tapes in the safe
1 full month, after 2 months I put the E-F tapes in the safe
1 full month, after 2 months I put the G-H tapes in the safe

for the next 2 months I would overwrite A-B and so on.

What could be the best configuration of GFS Media Pool?

Regards

[HannesK]

Hello,
as you only want to have full and you only want to have it monthly, I would take the standard media pool.

Create a job that runs monthly and select the months to run.

Best regards,
Hannes

[fspadaro]

Thanks Hannes,

Now I’m trying to understand how to structure backup jobs to optimize monthly storage (the set will be scheduled the last of the month) on tape, jobs have a retention of 14 days:

1 - If I configure the job as Forward forever incremental, on tape I would always have the last full of the month that is synthesized from the existing chain on the primary repository. (already tested in lab)

2 - If I configure the job as forever incremental with synthethic full, on tape it would bring the last syntentico of the month present in the repository that could have different dates between months (e.g. January 28, February 25, March 25...)

3 - If I configure the job as forever incremental with synthethic full and configure an active full that falls on the last day of the month and should copy this full to tape.

What do you think?

Thank you
Federico

[HannesK]

Hello,
1) yes correct
2 & 3) behave the same, yes. The last full is copied to tape. No virtual synthetic full

Synthetic fulls are free on REFS / XFS. Active full costs disk space, yes.

Best regards,
Hannes