7 day + 6 month tape config advice

[SteelContainer]

Hi there,

I am setting up backups to tape for a client and I'm looking for advise on the best configuration.

We are still in the testing phase and I suspect I don’t have the configuration quite right and perhaps there is a better way to achieve what the client wants. We may need to order more tapes/drives or reconfigure how the tape jobs work.

- Client wants 7 days + 6 Months of backups, tapes sent offsite daily.
- We allowed 2 LTO8 tapes per day for 7 days (14 tapes), and 2 tapes per month for 6 months (12 tapes).
- Source backup job data in the tape jobs shows 19.5TB full and 4.21TB incremental which is a bit more than we expected and we also expected the tape capacity to be around 12TB but Veeam is showing 10.9TB per tape.
- Source backup jobs are set to perform a synthetic full back up on Saturdays and keep 28 days of backups.
- We have one daily tape job set to use a daily media pool and I was hoping to be able to write a full backup across two tapes each day so we don’t need to worry about overwriting a full each week and breaking an incremental chain since we only have 7 days’ worth of tapes allocated. I’m thinking we might need to set the source backup jobs to run a synthetic full each day to drop the space required i.e. just a full to tape each day rather than full + incs. 2 tapes delivered each day and sent offsite the next day.
- There is also a monthly job which points to a monthly tape pool of 12 tapes (2 per month). 2 tapes delivered at the start of the month and sent offsite the next day.
- I understand there are also GFS media pools but I don’t really know how this would work with tape rotations (sending all tapes offsite each day) at our datacenter and perhaps it is better to stick with two regular media pools and keep the daily and monthly backups separate.

Appreciate any feedback on how you would configure this.
Thanks.

[SteelContainer]

Given the amount of data I'm thinking there are a few options to cover the daily backups to tape but only the first one really covers all the requirements:

Daily full backups for 7 days
- 3 tapes per day for 7 days, 2 tape drives to write data in 24 hours
- 21 tapes covers 7 days of fulls
- Daily tape change
- Set Source job to forward inc and synthetic full every day so only vbk copied each day

Weekly full with 6 daily incs
- 3 tapes for full on Monday, 2 tapes per day for 6 days of incs, 2 tape drives to write data in 24 hours
- 2 tape sets = 30 tapes. Covers two weekly inc chains
- Weekly tape change - tapes onsite for 7 days
- Set source job to forever forward inc and set tape job to create full on Monday

Weekly full no daily backups
- 3 tapes for full on Monday, 1 tape drive to write data over 48 hours
- 2 tape sets = 6 tapes. Covers two weeks of 1 full backup per week
- Weekly tape change - tapes onsite for two days

And only one real option for the monthly backups:

Monthly full backup
- 3 tapes for full on 1st of the month, 1 tape drive to write data over 48 hours
- 6 tape sets = 18 tapes. Covers six months of fulls
- Monthly tape change - tapes onsite for two days