Switching pools for full backups

[McClane]

Hi,

I want to automate our tape handling a little more and have a conceptual question.

I have a pool for weekly fulls and the daily incrementals which have both 4 weeks retention.

But I want to keep the first full backup of every month (that would be the first saturday) for 6 month retention.

So far I had a script that only showed me the all expired tapes except the ones that are younger than 6 month and full backups. But i had the idea, if I make another pool for full backups and set the retention to 6 month and change the job before the backup start to this pool and change it back to the normal pool, would that work? With work I mean, will the following incrementals have the 6-month-full as parent or will it use the last normal full?

[PTide]

Hi,

With work I mean, will the following incrementals have the 6-month-full as parent or will it use the last normal full?

First of all, such approach has not been ever tested as we have GFS media pools designed specifically for a long-term full backup retention. Although this might work well we cannot guarantee that everything will go smooth during restore. Another possible solution would be to use Backup Copy job with GFS scheduling, however that won't place fulls to tape.

Thanks

[McClane]

Okay not a good idea then.
GFS would be nice and I use it for a quarterly/yearly backup of a file server. But since it can't handle incrementals I would have a day every month where I either have to do 2 full backups, which would blow my backup window, or disable the weekly full and have incrementals for 2 weeks, which would be really bad if I have to do a full restore on the 13th day.

[veremin]

But I want to keep the first full backup of every month (that would be the first saturday) for 6 month retention.

But since it can't handle incrementals

Those statements seem to contradict a little bit. In order to archive full backup every month and protect it for 6 month, you will need to modify both GFS media pool and GFS backup to tape job - set 6 as monthly media set overwrite protection period and let backup to tape job run on the first Saturday of the month.

Or you're concerned that your tape infrastructure won't be able to handle two tape jobs (ordinary tape job, GFS one) cycles within one day?

Thanks.

[McClane]

Yep, full backup runs about 20 hours. And I would have two backups of the same day, which would be a waste of tapes.

I made a workaround now. The weekly fulls of the first backup in a month are now auto protected in a post-job script.
A weekly script will release the protected tapes that are: in vault, expired, protected and older than six months (just to be sure).

[veremin]

Yep, full backup runs about 20 hours. And I would have two backups of the same day, which would be a waste of tapes.

Then, you can choose different day for monthly GFS restore point in order not to run two full cycles within the same day.

Monthly GFS (which you appear to be after) is an additional layer of protection for which you have to pay with tape space. Personally I wouldn't call it a "waste".

I made a workaround now. The weekly fulls of the first backup in a month are now auto protected in a post-job script.
A weekly script will release the protected tapes that are: in vault, expired, protected and older than six months (just to be sure).

Be aware that as soon as retention policy reaches the first increment dependent on manually protected full, the whole chain of subsequent increments up to next full will become useless.

Thanks,

[McClane]

That's also a thing. I only keep two weeks worth of incrementals on tape. So in the third week the oldest incremental will be overwritten which renders the following incrementals useless, like you said. So I manually mark the tapes as free. Maybe an option to free tapes that belong to a backup chain would be nice.