Assistance with tape design

[rhys.hammond]

Hi everyone,

I am trying to work out a backup solution with tape that is simple and reliable for a remote site.

The infrastructure consists of two IBM servers with internal storage running VMware.
The virtual environment is very small, it only consists of two production virtual machines with a total used space <400GB.

The requirements for the site are,
7 days worth of backups on disk.
Weekly backups to tape that are taken off site.
Monthly Backup to tape that are taken off site.
Simple and efficient, They don't want to be swapping out tapes any more then necessary.

I am planning a standalone IBM server to run the Veeam Backup server with internal storage >4TB.
From my calculation this should be ample capacity for the temporary tape recovery space and the 7 days of retention + working space.
A single SAS attached LTO 6 tape drive will be used to perform the backups to tape.

I am planning to configure the following jobs
Daily Backup Job #1 - Forward Incremental with Active Full on Saturday, 7 Retention Points, Run once a day at 8:00PM

Now I am bit confused how I should configure the tape jobs to best achieve the requirements.
What I have in my head is as follow,

Veeam will copy the full vbk to tape every Sunday.
The first 3 Sundays of the month will be weekly backups which are overwritten each following month.
After the weekly backup to tape runs, the tape is taken offsite and the following weekly tape is brought onsite.
On the last Sunday of the months, a brand new tape is used in lieu of overwriting a weekly tape.
The last Sunday of the month tape will be archived for long term storage.

I want the tape job to run after the Active Full on Saturday to ensure that a single tape can restore the environment instead of relying on multiple tapes to recreate an incremental backup chain.

I am having trouble translating this into configuring the media pools and jobs. Can anyone shed some light on how best to configure the jobs and medial pools?
I am open to suggestions if there is a better way to meet these requirements?

Cheers

[veremin]

Can you clarify for how long you want to store weekly and monthly restore points on tapes? Thanks.

[rhys.hammond]

Weekly tapes, 4 weeks
Monthly, 3 years plus.

Ideally I was hoping to reuse the same weekly tapes each month by writing over them.
The end of month tape would be archived offsite for 3+ years.
Each new year 12 new tapes are purchased to replace last years end of month tape.

I am planning to run the jobs over the weekend so come first thing Monday, the tape will be ejected and the next weekends tape can be inserted.
Worth noting is that no one is in the office over the weekend to change over multiple tapes in the drive. I have calculated that Ishould be able to fit a full backup VBK file onto a single LTO6 with plenty of room left over.

[veremin]

You can:

1) Create a media pool called “Weekly” with retention period equal to 4 weeks.
2) Create a backup to tape job called “Weekly” and point to the “Weekly” media pool and schedule it to run on weekly basis.
3) Create a media pool called “Monthly” with retention period equal to ~36 months.
4) Create a backup to tape job called “Monthly” and point to the “Monthly” media pool and schedule it to run on monthly basis.

Schedule both backup to tape jobs to run on the same day (say, on Sunday). Since you want to have only full backup on tapes, in the settings of both media pools disable process incremental option and select Sunday as a day for synthesized full backup creation.

This way, once a week (and once a month), backup server will synthetically create a full backup directly on tapes. However, both weekly and monthly jobs will take place on the last day of month, as besides scripting there is no way to let one job supersede the other one.

Also, if I were you, I'd wait until patch#2 is released, as it's supposed to fix different problems related to synthesized full backup.

Thanks.

[rhys.hammond]

Hi v.Eremin

Thank you for your reply,
One question, would this setup require two separate tapes on the last day of the month? I ask because a single tape drive will be used and no one will be onsite to change the tape after hours and on weekends.

[veremin]

Yes, this design will require two mediums. Two jobs (weekly, monthly will take place on the same day) and currently you can't make one job supersede the other one. It's possible to schedule a custom script, though - on the given date it will disable weekly job. Thanks.