Replacing Tapes with External Drives

[BBush]

Our Tape Drive has died. ... Now that we have paused a moment for the dead drive, let us look forward.
The Powers That Be have decreed that instead of backing up to the Cloud (for lack of bandwidth and cost considerations) and that instead of replacing the Tape Drive (for cost considerations among other reasons), I will now backup to external portable drives. The plan is to backup to the drives similar to what we were doing with Backup To Tape; namely, a GFS plan with Weekly, Monthly, and Annual backups.

Here is the background on our Tape job that I sent to TPTB:
We should first know what the Tape schedule was. The Tape job backed up the backup files from the nightly backup jobs for the servers and recorded those files to tape. The Weekly job started Sunday nights at Midnight. The Monthly job started on the first day of every month at Midnight. The Yearly job would start January 1st at Midnight. What you may not know is that on December 31st I would manually kick off a backup job so that December would also have a Monthly backup tape. The reason is because the Annual Tape was sent to FarAwayCity to be stored in the Vault and we do not have ready access to it in HomeTown. The Monthly backup tapes were stored offsite and were readily accessible if needed. The Weekly tapes were kept in the tape library onsite so they were always accessible. We had 16 tapes for the Weekly jobs. We had 12 tapes for the Monthly schedule. Each Annual tape was only going to be used once and I kept 5 or 6 on hand for that job. We also had some spare tapes on hand for special backups (e.g., moving the server room from RentedSpace to OwnBuilding). The retention for each job was 8 weeks for Weekly, 12 months for the Monthly, and 5 years for the Annual.

You are probably familiar with what we were doing. Currently, our tapes were holding 4.4TB or up to 5.8TB of data. So, I'm looking at 5TB rugged HDDs and 8TB SSDs to back up onto instead of tape. I've already chosen the media to purchase. That was the easy part.

To obey the mandate handed down I need your wisdom to help me program jobs for the Weekly, Monthly, and Annual backups.

My thought is to create a job for each, but I am not sure that the server will give the same external drive letter each time. So, directing the target is a challenge. Then I want to schedule the jobs so that either a Synthetic Full backup is created (Weekly) or an Active Full backup is created (Monthly and Yearly).

Yes, I may be a little tongue-in-cheek, but it is serious. I do need your wisdom and advice. If you want to laugh at my situation even more, TPTB don't realize that the backup server only has USB 2.0 ports! Since these jobs won't affect Production, it really does not matter how long it takes to perform the backups to portable disc - but they may care if we have to restore from them.

Thank you in advance for any and all help.

[HannesK]

Hello,

but I am not sure that the server will give the same external drive letter each time

normally Windows does that (if the drive letter is not uses otherwise)

From a Veeam perspective, you are looking for the "Rotated Drives" option: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110

When comparing the limitations from the link above with your requirements, then separate jobs are the way to go, yes.

I don't know how much data you have, but upgrading to USB 3.0 or better might be useful.

Best regards,
Hannes

[soncscy]

Few things stand out to me that TPTB probably aren't gonna like

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110

As I remember, Rotated Drives can't be used for GFS, so using them as a replacement for Tapes means switching to "dumb" copies of GFS points that sit on disk. Not the worst thing in the world, but I think you can already see the issues in that you lose functionality this way

>TPTB don't realize that the backup server only has USB 2.0 ports!

This gets my skin itching a ton as even with decent enterprise server hardware, the hardware hosting the USB channels was always cheaped out on, and just personally I've seen it tank pretty badly. I would agree, get a dedicated USB 3.0 that supports USB-C Speeds (warning, be ready to do a LOT of research since the USB-C world is a mess; once you're there, it's great, but the only thing standard about this standard is that nothing is standard)

So I think you're going to be doing something like:

Primary Job GFS (just set it up as you wrote)
Then, use rsync or something on a schedule to copy to your drives.

I'd do some simple scripting and just keep a running log of what gets written to what drive so you can know which one to recover. Else, maybe it's time to upset TPTB if you can and explain that there's a reason you pay for Tape