Scheduling weekly backups where 4th week = last week

[nick_russell_HIT]

Hi All,

Firstly, my apologise if this is discussed in another forum topic. If there is one, please point it out to me and I'll close this topic.

I have configured monthly tape backups to run on the 1st Saturday of the month.
Weekly tape backups then run on the first, second, third, fourth and last Saturdays of the month.
The only issue with this configuration is that if there happens to be only four weeks in the month, both the Fourth and Last scheduled backups run one after the other (by design).

This could all be resolved if there was an option to run jobs on the 5th Mon/Tue/Wed/Thu/Fri/Sat/Sun of the month.

This isn't a huge issue but more of an annoyance I'd like to try to counter if possible.
To clean up afterwards I simply kill the second tape job; reallocate the tapes used in the second tape job and then send an apologetic email out to tell them that the first one succeeded and to disregard the superfluous, second tape backup.

Has anyone else come across this issue and/or have a workaround for it?

Thanks in advance,

- Nick

[Shestakov]

Hi Nick and welcome to the community!
Have you considered using GFS retention for tape jobs?
So you can have a single job instead of 6 and avoid data duplication.
Thanks!

[nick_russell_HIT]

Hi Shestakov,

Thank you for your reply - sorry it took so long for me to get one back to you!
I had a look at your link and I can't seem to find out where it matches up for me within Backup & Replication 9.
My screen looks more like this one: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/backup/vsp ... edule.html

I'm sure I'm missing something here; if you could point me in the right direction I'd really appreciate it!

Kind Regards,

- Nick

[alanbolte]

You have to create and select a GFS media pool first.

[plandata_at]

You have to create and select a GFS media pool first.

With big data GFS pools are in most cases useless because of the missing parallel tape processing possibility.

[Shestakov]

I had a look at your link and I can't seem to find out where it matches up for me within Backup & Replication 9.
My screen looks more like this one: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/backup/vsp ... edule.html

As Alan mentioned above you need to create GFS Media Pool and when you point a tape job to GFS media pool, you will be offered to choose GFS schedule.
Thanks!

[nick_russell_HIT]

I appreciate your replies

plandata_at thanks for your input; this is a very small implementation: a tape library with one tape drive and about a dozen VMs - so on that front I ought to be OK.
I need to read up on exactly what's involved with a GFS media pool but my (completely ignorant) initial reaction is that backups already taken under the current tape scheme using manual backup pools will be affected. I think I might need to get a bunch of tapes that have aged out their data to test having two concurrent backup pools and also that a GFS media pool will be able to exactly conform to the existing tape specification:
Weekly (Protect data for 4 Weeks)
Monthly (Protect data for 11 Months)
Quarterly (never overwrite data)

Thanks again,

- Nick

[Shestakov]

That looks like a good plan.
Let us know if any help is needed.