Incremental vs FULL?

[BostjanUNIJA]

Hi.
Need a little assistance.
A customer with VBR 12.1 and Tape Library.
We would like to achieve:
* daily backup to tapes (source: backup job of virtual machines)
* the idea is to do backup to tape on single tape: Mon,Tue,Wed,Thu,Fri,Sat,Sun
* on Monday a new backup set should be created and backup to tape should start on a new tape

We have configured the job, but the thing is:
* first tape worked fine until Monday (1st full, then incrementals, then on saturday when synthetic jobs are set on primary job it has also put that to tape...)
* on Monday a new tape was added, a new backup set has been sucessfully automatically created, but instead of putting full backup on this new tape I see that tape has only incremental backups on it?

How can we achieve that when a new backup set is created on a new tape, that it starts with full and not continuing incrementals from previous backup set?

Thanks for your ideas.

[david.domask]

Hi Bostjan,

Quick question, for the source backup jobs you're adding to the tape jobs, what is the retention mode? Forever Forward Incremental, Forward Incremental, or Reverse Incremental?

Backup to Tape will copy full backups if they are created periodically by the Primary Jobs, so to get it to work like you're hoping, you'd want to schedule the Primary Job(s) to have their full backup made on Monday.

If the source job is Forever Forward Incremental, then you can configure the tape job to schedule a Virtual Full Backup; this creates a full from a restore point that best matches the day you schedule the Virtual Full for (e.g., if you schedule Virtual full on Monday, the tape job will find a restore point from the Primary job that is closest to the Virtual Full day, usually just the increment made that day)

[BostjanUNIJA]

Hi.
Thank you for your reply.

Source/Primary job is configured as:
Retention policy: 7 days (no GFS enabled)
Backup mode: Incremental (recommended) with create synthetic full backups periodically on Saturday.
Customer wants to physically take out / replace tapes on Mondays.
Is there any other way that when a new backup set is created, and a new tape added that it wouldn't do incrementals, but start to make a full backup 1st?

[david.domask]

Understood! Is it feasible to change the synthetic full day to Monday then for the source job? The tape-out strategy will perform as expected then.

Alternatively, is switching the source jobs to Forever Forward a possibility and then setting Virtual Full schedule as prescribed previously?

Either option will work.

[BostjanUNIJA]

Hi.
I think we have another issue.
We have a new customer "demand" that they wish to have each day tape backup on seperate tape.
We have changed the media pool settings that every day a new backup set is created.
Why the 2nd tape only copies incrementals?
We would like to achive that on MONDAY: last backup chain (full backups and all the incrementals) is copied to backup tape.
Then on TUESDAY when a backup should start on second tape, we don't wish to have only incrementals there, we want full backups also.

[david.domask]

Hi Bostjan,

The situation should actually be remedied by the suggestions above; changing of the tape and opening/closing media set does not affect _what is backed up_ by the job, it simply tells the tape job when to start new media sets/use a new tape. The backup selection logic is still the same.

I would advise do some testing with the above suggestions, as this will be the "best" way to achieve your customer goals.

[BostjanUNIJA]

Hi.
Thank you for your reply David.

Well basically we were forced now to create backup job to tape for each day to achieve daily full backup to tapes and avoid making changes to primary jobs.
Basically now we have:
Media pool for each day.
Backup to tape job for each day.
Expiration of tapes 1 week.
We will see if this will now work the way we desire.

[david.domask]

Hi Bastjan

You are welcome, and I do understand the painpoint for you here. I do think the changes to the source job will not be as impactful as your client may suspect, but this solution will work, even if it means additional tape jobs to manage.

Perhaps as new jobs are created for additional workloads, start testing the waters with the above proposed configurations, as I do think that you and your client will find this far easier to manage.