Export Backups to Tape older than 30 days

[mathschut]

Hello, I have 4 Exchange Servers that make a backup to disk every 6 hours. A synthetic full backup is created on Saturdays. For reasons of space, I would now like to export the backups that are older than 30 days to tape and keep them for 10 years. How do I best set this up?

[Dima P.]

Hello Mathias,

There is no way to push backup older than X to tape, but honestly, it's not required. You just need to create a backup to tape job and set longer retention for your tape via media pool settings. While disk backups will be removed according to the vm backup retention, tape data will be available due to separate retention specified specifically for tape backups. Thanks!

[mathschut]

Hi and thanks for your answer. So do I make the normal backups on disk for 30 days and I set the tape backup to the time I want to keep it when I rotate? Does it still make sense to do GVS with the tape backup?

[Dima P.]

Mathias,

You are welcome! You got it right. You can do GFS (grandfather-father-son rotations if that's what you mean) with a special GFS media pools and configure it according to your backup policy, say, to create a full at the end of every month and keep it for one year. That's more efferent ways to store the specific restore points for 'critical' point in times because you do backup only specific restore points to tape.

I'd say it's up too you to decide what works the best for your environment or backup policy across your company: simple media pools allow you to create copy of what you have on disk but use more recourse due to the frequency of the backup, GFS can be created at the specific time, uses less tape media but does not create a copy of the backup on disk. Thanks!