Why use a GFS media pool

[stewsie]

We are investigating using a single GFS media pool as we want to keep monthly backups for a longer period of time. I cannot see anything in the Veeam documentation that explains the benefits of GFS over Standard media pools.

We currently have two standard pools for daily and weekly tape jobs and media sets are created weekly. It looks like we could create a third standard pool with monthly configured and keep those for the required amount of time

What are the benefits of GFS? To me it seems more complicated with the media sets and how they are created

Thanks

[david.domask]

Hi Paul,

The main benefit of GFS here will be instead of 3x jobs/media pools, you can accomplish the same task with a single job and media pool.

Our Tape FAQ has a Q&A on this which explains this a bit more, but ultimately GFS Media Pools do what you're already doing by having multiple jobs, and allows you to control the tape retention and media set creation for each media set (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly) within the same job/media pool.

There's no reason your initial idea would not work, but you can accomplish the same with a single GFS Media pool and Tape Job using the GFS Media Pool.

> What are the benefits of GFS? To me it seems more complicated with the media sets and how they are created

Can you elaborate on this a bit more? Media sets can seem a bit daunting at first, but they're purely a logical construct to make it easier to know what set of tapes contains which data, and the tape FAQ linked before has a bit more of an explanation on these as well.

[stewsie]

"Can you elaborate on this a bit more? Media sets can seem a bit daunting at first, but they're purely a logical construct to make it easier to know what set of tapes contains which data, and the tape FAQ linked before has a bit more of an explanation on these as well."

At the moment we have two media sets, one for daily and one for weekly and they are created weekly so we know which tapes have been used for the previous week and can be removed from the library. I couldn't see an option to do this with the GFS pool. I will have a look at the information you have provided. Thanks

[david.domask]

Understood, so it's how will the naming work.

With GFS Media Pool, each media set (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly) has its own media set naming. By default, the elder media sets (read: not daily) will create a new media set for each GFS period. So every week for example, a new Weekly media set is opened and the previous one closed, same with the other elder media sets.

So every tape used for that media set will be tagged as such and you will know what to export. So I think review the GFS materials and see if it works for you. Either way will work, but I think GFS will simplify quite a bit for you.