Taking "Backup Copy" Jobs to Tape.

[ash_wpa]

Hello.

We have a primary backup at live site. Goal here is to keep 1 weeks' worth of backups - 1 full and 5 Increments. Synthetic fulls are created at the weekend prior to more incrementals following thru the working week.

Each day we send all these incremental bits offsite through replication Backup Copy. Offsite we keep the 1 week increments, 3 weekly fulls, 2 monthly fulls. This gives us granular restore points through 1 week, 1 month (end of week fulls) and 1 quarter (end of month fulls).

I then have a tape drive at the offsite location where the backup copy data is sent to tape for archival and long-term/cheaper media retention.

HOWEVER AM STUCK...:

I want my jobs to take a single copy of the data to Tape at the end of the month and keep a monthly full archive going back 1 year or soon maybe increase to 2 years as necessary. But in practice I have noticed that all the compiled weekly bits are sending to tape - thus increasing the number of tapes we need, impacting time to complete and generally going to make any restore to a given month quite confusing.

Is there no way to just take the last full restore point to tape? Should I have primary weekly and monthly jobs separated out (to use reverse incremental once per month and then take to tape)? < this would not make efficient use through forever incremental and I doubt we'd replicate that many changes in short time-span.

Please can somebody clarify what I am missing here?

[Shestakov]

Hello Ash,

Looks like you are not missing anything. The backup to tape job copies all missing restore points it finds over the run. So if you have several full backups in the folder, it copies all of them.
We are aiming to provide tape-GFS support for to-tape jobs in the next release, but for now you can use File-to-Tape job with pre-job script to copy only a last full backup file.
Thanks.