[Feature Request] Tape Backup

[diogomarzano]

Hi, my sugestions:

- Disassociate the backup point from the start of the schedule execution. Examples:
---- Allow scheduling the GFS Tape backup of the 1st day of the month to run on the first saturday of the month;
---- Create a point-in-time GFS backup to tape on a specific day, using existing data from another repository;

- Recover a damaged tape using data from another repository;

- Add an option to, after end of backup, merge data from partially occupied tapes into a single tape(GFS Tape backup) - very useful with parallel tape drive jobs.

Thanks,

Diogo M Chaves

[david.domask]

Hi Diogo,

Will address these points one by one:

1. Allow scheduling of backup on 1st saturday of the month

Maybe I misunderstand your request, but you can already schedule on First/Second/Third/Fourth {day} of Month as shown on this User Guide page.

2. Create a point-in-time GFS backup to tape on a specific date, using existing data from another repository

Can you elaborate a bit more on the scenario you're trying to address here? As I understand it, you imagine a situation where a workload is protected by multiple jobs targeting different repositories, and you want to do an on-demand backup from another repository? Tape jobs allow you to add by source job or source repository, not by workload, so it would require Tape Jobs to be workload driven, but I'm not quite sure what the need is here

3. Recover a damaged tape using data from another repository

Please elaborate on this request a bit more as I don't quite understand. Is the goal to do partial recovery from tape and partial recovery from repository?

4. Add an option to, after end of backup, merge data from partially occupied tapes into a single tape(GFS Tape backup) - very useful with parallel tape drive jobs.

Can you elaborate a bit more on the use-case for this? As I understand it, you want to optimize storage utilization on Tape by copying data from partially full tapes into a single full tape, am I correct? This should be controllable based on the Media Set Creation options. The "Append" option will tell the tape job to continue writing to the previous tape until full, and then continue with a new/free tape.

[diogomarzano]

3-2-1 Backup Scenario: Tier 0 (SSD - few days) -> Tier 1 (HDD Backup - few years)
\-> Tier 2 (Tape Backup - few years)

Examples:
1,2 - I need backups from 00:00 on the first day of the month, but due to time constraints or tape issues, the Tape GFS job started at a different time (I have data needed on Tier 0 or Tier 1).
3 - I have an annual tape mediaset, but due to a drive or tape failure, I lost a tape from the mediaset. Now I have an annual mediaset, but it is incomplete. I have the same data on Tier 1 and want to reconstruct my lost annual tape mediaset.
4 - I have a GFS tape backup that uses 20 tapes. If I use 6 tape drives, my backup may end up with 6 nearly empty tapes. An option that reorganizes the data on the nearly empty tapes at the end of the backup could help minimize tape usage and save on vault space.

Thanks,

Diogo M Chaves

[david.domask]

Thank you for the clarifications, however I'm still not quite getting a few items:

1,2: I do not yet understand it fully, can you elaborate why the schedule options available don't help here?

3: Try removing the invalid tape from catalog and running the job again, if there are still restore points eligible for this period in the repository, it will try to back-fill those.

4. I think this is best reviewed by Support as seems like a configuration issue with media sets. Unfortunately it will be quite difficult to tell what to reconfigure without a review of the logs, so please open a case and include logs for Support to review (Use the 1st radio button to export from jobs, select the Tape GFS job that uses 20 tapes and does not utilize all the tapes full for export)

Please share your case number once created, thanks!