"Air gapped" copies best practice

[Stupots]

Hi

Currently we have several jobs totalling around 200 high importance VM jobs that I then backup to tape + to an immutable repository; my question is... would I be better off copying from the main job to immutable, then backing up from immutable to tape, as I'm seeing the backups on immutable (XFS) are a smaller than on the non immutable repos (ReFS) so this would save us a bit of tape space.

I guess getting both physical and virtual air gaps from the original backup file is good, but is there any disadvantage from copying to tape from the immutable copy?

What is considered best practice in this scenario?

Thanks, Stu.

[HannesK]

Hello,
the space difference is probably just because of 64KB vs 4KB block size on the file system. That should make no difference on tape. But you can enable tape compression for a bit of space savings (there is a forum thread about that)

It does not matter, where you copy from. I would use the fastest source to get it done faster.

Best regards,
Hannes