How to copy latest backup sets to tape every weekday (incrementals) and weekend (fulls) with efficient tape usage?

[StanO]

Hello all,

I'm looking for help devising a better strategy for spooling our backup data to tape every weeknight and every weekend. What we're trying to accomplish is to have the daily incremental backup chains copied to tape each night for 24-hour off-site storage. Currently, we use Copy Files to Tape job for each weekday with each day having its own tape pool containing 2 tapes. Each LTO-9 tape provides ample space to store backups beyond our 30-day daily backup retention so while backup date is being written to the second tape, the retention period of all data that was written to the first tape will expire before the first tape needs to be used again. This provides relatively efficient use of tapes for our daily backups requiring 10 tapes for all 5 weekdays. These weekday Copy Files to Tape jobs include only *.vib, *.vbm and .bco files. Friday nights we run periodic full backups for all of our jobs and on Sundays we run a Copy Backups to Tape job that has the "Process latest full backup chain only" option set and so copies only the latest .vbk file to tape. All this works great - with one caveat. If we want to retain more than one week worth of backups on disk, our weekday Copy Files to Tape jobs will include .vib files from the previous week(s) and our 2 tape daily pools will become insufficient.

At first glance, it appears GFS media pools might help out with this situation, but I think we would lose the efficient tape usage portion of our current solution. Since a backup set is closed when it is exported from a library, we would end up needing on the order of 20 (22?) tapes to store our daily backup sets which, in turn, would require tracking additional tapes outside of the library as the number of tapes in our various tape rotations would then exceed the number of slots in our library. I'd like to avoid this, if possible as it could be prone to error. Also, I don't like keeping tapes outside of a library any more than is necessary to satisfy an off-site need to minimize to opportunity for drops or mishandling.

I'm considering implementing a post-backup script to maintain a separate folder tree containing copies of only the latest .vib, .vbm and .bco files and spooling that folder off to tape. Before I go down that path, however, I thought I'd check in here to see if I'm missing something obvious or if anybody has suggestions for a better approach.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions,

Stan

[Dima P.]

Hello Stan,

It's always a balance between the efficient space consumption and granularity. If you want to utilize as much tape space as possible you have to combine all the sources within as little tape jobs as possible and point those to the same media pool with no separated media set created (i.e. continue to use existing media set option). This approach however creates a mix all wanted / unwanted data on tape and you loose the flexibility to reuse some particular tapes with shorter retention (as retention would be the same for all the data on tapes).

it appears GFS media pools might help out with this situation

GFS media pools are great because allows you to mix long term retention needs with daily tape outs using multiple retention for the almost the same datasets.

.vib, .vbm and .bco files and spooling that folder off to tape

There is no need to copy vib / vbm and other backup files as long as you use backup to tape. For .bco file to tape job is indeed required. Thank you!