Always Full backup to tape

[patrickds]

Is there any way to always get a full backup on tape, even if the linked job has no new data?

We run daily and weekly jobs, forward incrementals.
There is a daily secondary backup to tape, with synthetic full, but this only writes data from the daily job, except on the weekend, when the weekly job has run.

For ease of restore from tape, and because there is a lot of remaining space on the tapes, we would like to have everything written to tape every day, even if that means the same data will be written every weekday between weekly jobs.
That way we know everything is available from every tape.

Is there any way to force this, apart from changing the weekly job into a daily?

[david.domask]

Hi patrickds,

Just to ensure I understand correctly, you have:

Job 1: Runs every day
Job 2: Runs once a week

Every day on tape, you want:

Current backup chain for Job 1
Current backup chain from Job 2, even if you're re-writing the same backup file each day

Am I understanding your tape-out strategy correctly?

File to Tape is the easiest answer here -- the restore narrative changes a bit as you need to pick specific files, but forcing full backups each day of the File to Tape job would meet your requirement. You can send File to Tape and Backup to Tape jobs to the same media pool, so you could consider a separate file to tape job writing to same media pool alongside the backup to tape job to meet this requirement, or similarly create multiple Backup to Tape jobs targeting the same media pool

[patrickds]

Job 1: Runs every day
Job 2: Runs once a week

Every day on tape, you want:

Current backup chain for Job 1
Current backup chain from Job 2, even if you're re-writing the same backup file each day

Exactly. Both full backups together are about 3.5TB, so space enough on Ultrium 8 tapes.

I've had a look at the files to tape backup, but that would change our backup strategy too much, adding an additional job just to get the weekly backup on tape. It would also mean the data gets read over the network, whereas now it goes from the backup-to-disk server to the tape-server over a dedicated 10Gb fibre.
I think we will just change the weekly job to run daily. These servers hardly change, so it will be a short window.

Another issue we've encoutered a couple of times now: we've had backup to tape jobs writing no data. 'No new files to backup per job setting', even though there was a new incremental backup since the last copy to tape.
Are incrementals, taken on the same day as a previous copy to tape, not considered as new backups for that day?

[david.domask]

> I think we will just change the weekly job to run daily. These servers hardly change, so it will be a short window.

Would work as well, and if you don't mind the backup workload on production for the incremental backup, then this will work quite well and avoid File to Tape.

> Are incrementals, taken on the same day as a previous copy to tape, not considered as new backups for that day?

We're talking about normal Backup to Tape, correct? Each run of the Backup to Tape job will compare what is in the repository to what is already on tape, and backup anything not on tape according to the tape job configuration.

It would be best to open a Support Case for the job runs when nothing was backed up and let Support review the debug logs. Export logs for the affected job, and Support will review and help understand why those sessions didn't back anything up.