Retention for Daily Backups after synthetic full

[bjoernwolter]

We back up our ESX VMs to disk from Monday to Sunday using the incremental backup method. A Synth. Full backup is created on Sundays. Every day, after a successful Backup2Disk, the backup is performed on LTO. We have set up a GFS pool for this purpose. Our plan is to save the incremental backups from Monday to Saturday to a single LTO tape (to maximize tape utilization). On Sundays, the weekly backup is to be performed on a different tape.
The GFS pool is configured as follows:
• Daily: Overwrite Protection 30 Days, Use Any Media, Append, Do Not Export
• Weekly: 4 Weeks, Use any Media, Do Not Append; Do Not Export
• Monthly: 12 Months, Use any Media, Do Not Append; Do Not Export
• And so on…
The full backups on Sundays work perfectly. The following incremental backups from Monday to Saturday also work perfectly.

But now there's a problem. It's not always guaranteed that the tape containing the previous (daily) incremental backups (Mon-Sat) can be removed on Mondays. This results in another incremental backup being performed on the „same“ tape on Monday. A new tape is only taken when the previous one is no longer in the library.
We would like the tape containing the previous incremental backups to also be protected after the Sunday full run, and a new tape to be taken.
What are we doing wrong? Or what is the best solution to achieve our goal?

[david.domask]

Hi bjoernwolter,

If your tape library has mail slots (I/E slots), you can configure the job to Export the tapes, though this would occur after every job run.

You can however use Powershell with the ExportCurrentMediaSet and ExportDays arguments to ensure the Daily media set gets exported on Saturday.