[Feature request] Add all daily files to tape in GFS scenario

[ChristianHa]

The idea is that all daily files of the week are written to a daily tape in a GFS scenario.

On Monday: Monday file is written to Monday tape
On Tuesday: Monday + Tuesday file is written to Tuesday tape
On Wednesday: Monday + Tuesday + Wednesday file is written to Wednesday tape
Similar for Thursday.

(Currently Veeam only writes the file of the day to the tape. Monday - Monday, Tuesday - Tuesday, ...)

This feature could be activated through a simple checkbox in the GFS daily settings.

Why?

Assuming GFS is configured with 4 daily tapes from Monday to Thursday, weekly and monthly on Friday. What if a disaster, for example the building burns down, happens in the night from Monday to Tuesday? Let's assume further we want to have two "meaningful" restore points, as recommended by Veeam. The Monday tape is burnt. The next available tape would be Friday the week before. This has been taken off-site on Monday, all good. The second restore point would be Thursday the week before. But to restore Thursday's data we need the tape of Friday before last Friday plus Monday plus Tuesday plus Wednesday plus Thursday - as these are incremental, correct? When Monday is overwritten the chain is broken.

The story is the same if less dramatic things happen than a building burndown. The Monday tape is overwritten and this breaks the chain. Same for Tuesday and Wednesday. Or am I getting something wrong?

It would be an option to use 8 instead of 4 tapes. But the simple feature as described above would make it safe with 4 tapes and twice as safe with 8. Or we could do synthetic full backups each day. Our weekly backup is 20 times as big as the incremental. That would unnecessarily wear the material .

Actually we would turn the incremental backup strategy, which is great, into a differential on the tapes. That would make off-site tape backups, which is still a great strategy, more secure.

[Dima P.]

Hello Christian,

What if a disaster, for example the building burns down, happens in the night from Monday to Tuesday? Let's assume further we want to have two "meaningful" restore points, as recommended by Veeam. The Monday tape is burnt.

If you export tapes from the daily media set, likely, you will lose the latest tapes while oldest part of the media set remains operational.

On Monday: Monday file is written to Monday tape
On Tuesday: Monday + Tuesday file is written to Tuesday tape
On Wednesday: Monday + Tuesday + Wednesday file is written to Wednesday tape
Similar for Thursday.

Mind me asking if you are worried about tape media consumption or not, as such approach requires x times more tape media to keep the backup chains isolated?

From the top of my head you can achieve your goal even now with 5 independent tape jobs pointed to 5 independent media pools. Each job and each pool will represent the day of the week, tape jobs can be scheduled to run at the desired day, and, since they are independent, they will copy all the content since last start (which would be previous week). Cheers!