GFS on tape - What is written on tape?

[stephanreipoeler]

Hello,

I am faced with the task of writing backups to tape using GFS jobs. The backups should be kept for 10 years. In addition, every day of the 10 years should be recoverable.
  Due to the requirements of the DSGVO (our data protection commissioner confirms this), this procedure is required. Unfortunately, despite extensive searches in Google, I found nothing suitable. Can someone tell me how to do that? Or can someone tell me what is stored on the tape at daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. I do not understand that in the concise description in the online help. Is it possible to recover every single day of the 10 years?

Thank you for answers

Stephan

[PTide]

Hi,

For all types of media sets (except daily) GFS job will copy/synthesize full backup from source repository/job.

For daily media set it will simply copy whatever there is on the source repo (be it incremental or full backup) as is unless there is another media set of a higher order (i.e. weekly, monthly, quaterly, or yearly) scheduled on the same day. In that case, GFS will not copy anything to the Daily set, but will copy Full backup to the other set scheduled on the same day.

Example 1:

If you have a forever incremental job and GFS Tape job that has weekly backup scheduled for Sunday, by the end of the week you'll find 6 increments on Daily set, and one full on Weekly set.

By the end of the 2nd week you'll find 12 increments on Daily set, and 2 fulls on Weekly set.

Example 2:

Backup job with fulls on Fridays, GFS Tape job with daily, weekly (Saturdays), and monthly (first Sunday) sets.

By the end of the month your Daily set will contain all increments except those that have occurred on Saturdays and the 1st Sunday of the month. Increments from Saturdays of each week and 1st Sundays of the month will be used to generate corresponding fulls on Weekly and Monthly media sets, respectively.

Thanks!

[Shestakov]

Note that if you use say monthly GFS restore point, it doesn't contain all backups of the month, but only 1 restore point for each VM.
If you need every daily backup to be kept for 10 years, you don't need to use GFS retention, but can deal with regular Media pools.

[stephanreipoeler]

Thank you for your descriptions. Now I understand, how GFS Mediapools are working. I 'am going to use the GFS Mediapools instead of using normal Media pools. I think, it's better for the requirement to backup the yearly full.

[PTide]

The problem is, that with GFS pool you'll need to somehow ensure the tapes from Daily pool are not getting overwritten. The maximum amount of days of overwrite portection that you can set in UI for daily pool is 999, which is obviously not enough. In case someone makes a mistake and tries to reuse a tape which age has already passed the limit the tape will be overwritten. That is, I think it might be more convenient to have a simple pool for daily backups for the whole course of 10 years, and a separate job using GFS pool for "milestone backups" like weekly/monthly/quater/yearly fulls.

Thanks!

[stephanreipoeler]

Hello,

is it possible to extend the input field for the Daily Protection Period elsewhere, possibly via a registry key, so that I can set 3650 days (= 10 years)?

[Shestakov]

You can set the data retention equal to 120 months or just protect the tape from overwrite with no expiration.