best practice for gfs tape job

[liorme]

hi
i have a single tape lto8 device. with 30tb tapes (uncompressed 12tb).
we need to backup hyper-v vms for the sum of about 8tb
we need retention as follows :
30 days daily
every month for 12 months
every year for 7 years

our compliance demand is to take the tape physically once a month and place a new one
my question is, how does the gfs pool will behave in such a case?
for example, the first tape is placed. and then the daily starts to run. say that after a month, someone comes and pulls the tape > places a new one. so let's say that in the GFS order, there is one more daily to do, and the next cycle will be the first monthly.
how it will behave?

[Dima P.]

Hello liorme,

i have a single tape lto8 device. with 30tb tapes (uncompressed 12tb).

Please keep in mind the uncompressed size whenever you estimate the tape consumption for Veeam backups. Backup files are already compressed and deduplicated, so tape hardware compression does not really affect the space consumption on tape.

my question is, how does the gfs pool will behave in such a case? for example, the first tape is placed. and then the daily starts to run. say that after a month, someone comes and pulls the tape > places a new one. so let's say that in the GFS order, there is one more daily to do, and the next cycle will be the first monthly. how it will behave?

Full backup will land into daily media set whenever there is no weekly/monthly/yearly full to link incremental backups to. I'd just recommend to schedule weekly full right after you perform tape export, then you will have weekly full first thing after export while all concurrent runs to daily media set will rely on this weekly backup. Thanks!

[liorme]

thank you
and what about going forward? in your example, the weekly full will have this tape "self sustained" because as a result, each tape will have at least one full in it.
but what about the future to come? monthly, yearly?

[Dima P.]

You are welcome! If weekly, monthly and yearly are scheduled at the same day you will have only one full backup at the elder media set. Say weekly and monthly backup should be performed today, tape out will be performed only to monthly media set with monthly retention. Daily incremental backups will be linked to such monthly full backup.