Reverse incremental to tape

[jlh]

Hi all,

I have a problem understanding how to schedule a backup to tape. We are doing reverse incremental backups every day and have defined tape jobs as secondary target. Because we have to manually change the tapes, we would only like to backup to tape on weekdays. In the schedule of the GFS tape job however there isn't an option to set only weekdays or even days at all. Any way I can set daily backup to disk but only weekdays backup to tape using GFS?

Thanks,
Jerry

[david.domask]

Hi Jerry,

With Tape GFS, while the Tape job will always start its scanning for backup files at the specified time, if the current day is not part of a GFS period and it should do nothing, it will not move any backups to tape.

Can you describe your tape-out strategy a bit more? GFS Media Pools create a single full archival restore point on tape for the given GFS period, but it kind of sounds like you want to get incremental backups as well, but I may be misunderstanding. If you could describe the desired strategy a bit, it would be appreciated and we can better comment.

[jlh]

Thanks for your help David.
We use the reverse incremental because we want a full backup on tape every day. As far as I understand Veeam does exactly that. Only the full VBKs are written to tape, not the VIBs. My boss doesn't like the idea of inserting several tapes to restore all after a possible cyber attack. Not many, but some employees work over the weekend thus we do the backup to disk also on weekends. But there is no one to insert a tape on Saturdays or Sundays. In the GFS settings daily backup is set to „Every day“ and can’t be changed.
I hope this helps?

[david.domask]

Understood -- will you be keeping long term GFS archives? (Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly?) or the focus is just to have a daily tape-out of each full backup?

GFS Tape jobs work with the most recent restore point, and you can accomplish a full on tape every day with a Simple Media Pool.

Schedule the tape job to run Daily and from the down-down menu, select On Weekdays.

With your current configuration, you will have daily full backups on tape only during the weekdays.

Please note however that Reverse Incremental is being removed in v13; for getting a full every day to tape, consider Forward Incremental with Synthetic Fulls enabled for each day, targeting an XFS or ReFS repository. With Fast Clone support for XFS/ReFS, you will be able to have space-less fulls, but still have full backups going to tape each day like you're hoping.

[jlh]

Yes, I want to keep the daily for 14 days, the weekly for a month and the monthly for a year and yearly for 10.
I’d like to stick with GFS. I’ve used it in the past and I was familiar with it then. We have tapes 2 each for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday for the daily, which I keep for 14 days. We have 3 (4) tapes for Fridays for the weekly to keep them for a month and 1 for each month which should be written on the last Friday, kept for 12 months. December will be the yearly and kept for 10 years. Each tape should only contain full backups.

With my current configuration I see canceled tape jobs on the weekend. I set the wait time for new tape to 1 hour. A trick I had used in the past to increase from 72 hours to 96. So I have to use Simple Media Pool to be able to select Weekdays only? No way with GFS?

And thanks for the hint. We’ve been using the new server for only 2 weeks now, so I guess we’d better change that now.

[david.domask]

Understood, thank you for the explanation on the tape-out strategy, Jerry.

And understood on GFS; I saw "reverse incremental" and usually I see this used intentionally with Tape Simple Media pools as the result is a full backup to tape every day. Is Full backup on tape each day a requirement or we can use incrementals here?

With Daily Media Set for Tape GFS, by default the media pool is configured to _append_ to the existing tape, so you will have your incremental dailies on one tape, and the corresponding full backup for these increments (likely*) on the Weekly tape.

I am aware of requests for "pause on weekends" for GFS, but nothing to share at this time on the request. Would you consider simply putting the library in maintenance mode on Fridays prior to leaving? Or perhaps a post-job script for the tape job that will do so after Friday's run? That would prevent the job from sitting there and waiting, or you could simply disable the job for the weekend. Please note however with Tape GFS, disabling the job will cause the Tape GFS job to ignore all backup files created before it is re-enabled, so disabling may not be the best option.

So Daily GFS can work if full backups to tape each day is NOT a requirement. If you do want full backups each day on tape, I would advise two tape jobs:

Tape GFS = Set to run for your weekly, monthly, and yearly
Tape with Simple Media Pool = Set for your short term backups, set a Virtual Full to be created each day, and you will have full backups on tape each day. Alternatively, configure XFS/ReFS for the source job's repository and create Synthetic Fulls each day as discussed above.

[jlh]

Thanks David. Full backups daily are requiered so I'll give the 2 tape jobs a shot. This sounds like a good idea. Only thing is we dont have ReFS so I'll try as you stated above.