Need help with retention policies and so on

[hoFFy]

Hi,

one of our customers uses a standalone LTO-6 drive with 5 tapes, one for each wekday.
One full backup per day needs about 500GB, so he could save 4 backups on one tape until its full.

He would like to safe as many full backups (of one weekday) on one tape until the tape is full and gets automatically purged.

Saying he has one tape for each weekday, the tape for Mondays would have the backups from Monday of week 1, week 2, week 3, week 4 -> in week 5 the tape gets deleted and Monday full from week 5 is added and so on. Same for the other weekdays.

How can I realize this with media sets, retention policy and so on?


Only deleting the oldest backups from one tape until there is enough space available on tape to save the newest full backup is technically not possible, isn't it?

[foggy]

Only deleting the oldest backups from one tape until there is enough space available on tape to save the newest full backup is technically not possible, isn't it?

Correct, the entire tape will be overwritten on reaching the specified retention setting.

To achieve what you're after, you would need to create 5 backup to tape jobs (one per week day) and configure each of them to use the daily backup job as a source, start new media set monthly, and set the media pool retention to 1 month so that the tapes be re-used automatically after 1 month. Not a super easy setup, but should work.

[veremin]

One full backup per day needs about 500GB, so he could save 4 backups on one tape until its full.

Also, are you saying that that you're running run full backup on daily basis? What's the reason behind this decision? Or it's more about reversed incremental backup job being selected as a source for tape job? Thanks.

[hoFFy]

Thanks for your solution Alexander, I'll give it a try.

Vladimir: Yes it's a reversed incremental job, therefore I was speaking of "full backup".

[hoFFy]

To achieve what you're after, you would need to create 5 backup to tape jobs (one per week day) and configure each of them to use the daily backup job as a source, start new media set monthly, and set the media pool retention to 1 month so that the tapes be re-used automatically after 1 month. Not a super easy setup, but should work.

Where can I create a new media set monthly? The only options I'm seeing is
- Do not create, always continue
- Create new every session
- Daily at xx, everey day / on these days

[foggy]

Correct, you cannot create a monthly media set, sorry for that. Then, in case there's only one tape per week day, you would have to mark it as free manually once it is full.