Moving backup copies to tape

[perjonsson1960]

Folks,

We are backing up all our servers, VMs and physical, to disk once a day. And we have some backup copy jobs that run continously, and copies restore points from some of the backups, as they appear. And the backup copies are also put on disk, in a server at another physical location. The backup copy jobs use a GFS retention policy to create weekly, monthly and yearly backups.

Very soon we will add a tape server. And my question is this; Is it possible to move existing backup copies from disk to tape and delete them from disk, and still keep the backup chain (including GFS) intact on tape? For example, move the monthly GFS fulls to tape now and then, and delete them from disk? If not, what is the best practise to use when we want to move stuff to tape in order to free up disk space on our repositories?

Sincerely,
Per Jonsson

[Dima P.]

Hi perjonsson1960.

Yes, it's possible to write backup files produced by backup copy job to tape (similar to regular VM backups you just need to specify a backup copy job name in backup to tape job properties). What's not possible is to automate the backup copy job deletion, but I believe you can set the lower retention from your backup copy which would force copy job to retire backup files more frequently.

[perjonsson1960]

Thank you!