Tabe job configuration questions, beginner

[PecenkA]

Hello. I need some help understanding and configuring tape backup jobs. We bought an IBM tape library recently and I've never dealt with tape backups before. Tape library currently has 1 drive and enough tapes loaded to cover our needs for a while. Our current non tape backup jobs are:
1. Primary backup to immutable repository, incremental, with synthetic full every saturday.
2. Second is backup copy to another storage.
3. Third is copy to Veeam Cloud Connect.

For the time being or until I learn more, I set one tape backup job that runs after the above ones. I then export the tapes manually every monday. We don't run backups on sundays, so the exported tapes should contain everything on monday morning?

I'd like to achieve the following with the tapes:
1. Daily tape backup job with weekly tape export. I'd like to rotate 4 tape sets for this, so 3 sets are always offsite.
2. Full tape backup every 3 months for archival purposes.

So, how do I configure jobs to do that? I'm aware of automatic tape export. Do I use normal Media Pools or GFS? Any pointers would be helpful.

[Dima P.]

Hello PecenkA,

Welcome to the tape world!

I set one tape backup job that runs after the above ones.

You can schedule tape job to be performed after the latest backup job or use start after this job option in tape job schedule.

I then export the tapes manually every monday. We don't run backups on sundays, so the exported tapes should contain everything on monday morning?

Correct.

I'd like to achieve the following with the tapes:
1. Daily tape backup job with weekly tape export. I'd like to rotate 4 tape sets for this, so 3 sets are always offsite.
2. Full tape backup every 3 months for archival purposes.

Sounds like the best way to go is GFS media pools / GFS tape jobs. Please take a look at the GFS Backup to Tape article.

So, how do I configure jobs to do that? I'm aware of automatic tape export. Do I use normal Media Pools or GFS? Any pointers would be helpful.

Use combination of daily, weekly and monthly media sets within single GFS media pool, but make sure that schedule for weekly and monthly fulls overlap with each other in the tape job. Then instead of creating weekly and monthly full backup on tape you will get a monthly full backup only (since it's the same data but with longer retention there is no need for extra full backup, of course unless you have requirement). Hope it helps!

[PecenkA]

Thank you Dima P. It helps a lot.