GFS tape backup question

[Dazza13]

Hi,
Currently have a tape job using a GFS media pool, currently we backup to tape daily weekly monthly and yearly. What i want to be able to do is remove the weekly tape backup and have only daily monthly and yearly. As I understand it if I untick weekly then it removes daily as well, how can i just stop the weekly backup to tape but keep the daily incremental?

I'd like to keep the single GFS tape job/media pool rather than having multiple one.

[Shestakov]

Hi Darren,
It's impossible to uncheck weekly media set and keep daily increments because you need weekly restore points for later use of monthly ones.
Is your goal to save space on tapes? What retention does you source (disk) job has?
Thanks

[Dazza13]

The source disk jobs of which their are 11 have a mixture of 7 or 14 days retention depending on the service being backed up.

Currently yes i need to try and reduce the tape usage, we only use an LTO5 drive so we avaerage about 10-12 tapes per full backup until I can get the budget for a new LTO8 autoloader i need to try and reduce the amount of tapes used on a weekly basis.

[Dima P.]

Hello Darren,

Can you please clarify if the source jobs are configured in forever forward incremental or periodic full backups are scheduled as well? Thanks!

[Dazza13]

Hi the source jobs are set to run incremental with a synthetic full every Friday.

[Dima P.]

Thanks for the update! While daily media set is designed to store the incremental backups in cannot work correctly without periodic full backup and that's the reason you cannot enable the daily media set without weekly fulls.

Is it possible to run weekly tape backup on Friday and monthly backups on last Friday of the month? With such setup daily media set wont process synthetic full from disk, instead full backup will be placed into weekly media set. When it comes to monthly backup - instead of landing the full backup to weekly media set you will have it in monthly media set. As a result - you wont have the same full backup stored several times which helps you to achieve the tape usage.