GFS - Regular Weekly/Monthly manual trigger

[ekisner]

When right-clicking on the GFS job, one can choose to start the job, or do an active weekly/monthly. Our GFS job ran over the weekend, doing its monthly backup. Unfortunately, due to a bug which I'm presently waiting on a hotfix for, it also ran the weekly job into my monthly tapes, and that pool ran out of tapes.

I marked the tapes free, and wish to start the job again. Using the VBKs that it already has. I don't want it to generate a new synthetic VBK from the VIBs.

How can I trigger a manual "normal" backup in GFS, to the monthly tapes?

[Shestakov]

Hello Erik,
What do you call a normal backup? GFS media pool consists only from GFS backups, which are always .vbks
If you want to perform a backup with another retention settings, you need to write it to another, not GFS media pool.
Thanks!

[ekisner]

I want to copy my current VBKs which are the intended monthly VBKs, to tape.

When I start the GFS job, or use the Active > Monthly context menu option, both of them attempt to roll up the VIBs into a new synthetic VBK. This is not desired. I want the VBKs that were made on Friday.

[Shestakov]

Thanks for the clarification.
By design when you start a backup to tape job, it tries to roll all restore points and make a full backup. Workaround here is to choose the incrementals you don`t want to be written on the tapes and click Remove from inventory (not Delete from disk!) and start the tape job. Once it`s done you rescan the repository to add the increments back.

[ekisner]

Hmm.. what would happen then if an incremental job runs while they're removed from inventory? The tape job will take several days, and incremental jobs run on variable schedules ranging from every 4 hours to every day depending on what's being backed up.

[Shestakov]

It will start a new chain of increments, i.e. first run will have a difference between the vbk-day and today`s states.
Another option is to copy the vbk file you want to copy on tapes to the disk and use it as the source of newly created backup to tape job. No other manipulation with source backups is needed.

[ekisner]

That's not really an option either - I don't have an extra 6.5TB that I can throw at my backups. Starting new chains would mean a loss of RPO, so that's definitely out too.

I'll just use my old monthly job. Please consider it an earnest feature request to make the synthetics optional within the GFS job - they're entirely undesired in our environment. Even if they're enabled by default, having the ability to turn them off will be essential and the GFS feature will be a nightmare to use without turning it off.

[Shestakov]

I see your point and we will definitely take your request into account.

Starting new chains would mean a loss of RPO, so that's definitely out too.

Why does it mean the loss of RPO?

Hmm.. what would happen then if an incremental job runs while they're removed from inventory? The tape job will take several days, and incremental jobs run on variable schedules ranging from every 4 hours to every day depending on what's being backed up.

Another option just came to my mind is to rescan back those increments just after the tape job started writing on the tape. I believe you can make it in 4 hours, so you don`t need to start a new chain.

[ekisner]

Why does it mean the loss of RPO?

Another option just came to my mind is to rescan back those increments just after the tape job started writing on the tape. I believe you can make it in 4 hours, so you don`t need to start a new chain.

Ah, I assumed that with another chain started, the old would become invalid - not that the data itself would be invalid, just that the superseded incremental would be ignored or discarded by application logic. Sounds like that's not the case.

That option indeed sounds like it would work. Our legacy monthly job is just finishing up, so hopefully I have a hotfix in place before I need to try out your workaround

Thank you Shestakov.

[Shestakov]

You are welcome Erik,
Let me know how the workaround work in your case once you give it a try.