Help setting up tape rotation

iaind

iaind

iaind

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Joined
26 Feb 2009
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Morning all,

I'm replacing our ageing standalone SDLT tape drives with a nice shiny new Quantum LTO4 autoloader.

I've done a fair bit of work with Backup Exec (now on 2010) before so I'm happy setting up the jobs, but I've never worked with a loader before.

What I want to achieve is a grandfather-father-son rotation. So monday-thursday are just reused every week. Then, friday A,B,C tapes rotated every month and removed from the loader and put in a safe. Finally, on the last friday of the month, a monthly archive tape which will be taken off site.

So how much automation is it realistic to expect, and how would I go about achieving it?

TIA
 
Within Backup Exec partition the slots of the autoloader, so first four for mon-thurs, next 3-4 for Friday tapes and the rest for Month tapes (depending on how many slots you have).
Create three separate backup jobs and specify the partitions you want for each, so the daily will use partition one etc, set the schedule and that should be it.
I dont think the above is the recommended way of doing it but i couldn't think of an alternative. I'm open to suggestions :D
 
Thanks, that sounds logical

Presumably I'd use retention rules to ensure the right tapes are used?
 
Setting up the job to use the right partition will mean only those tapes in the partition are ever used for the job, then set the retention to whatever time period you want.
It depends on how much data you are backing up. Do you want to use a separate tape everyday or let the autoloader decide if it can append tuesdays to the monday tape then carry over to tuesdays tape, you get more backups on them and on a restore the loader handles putting the right tapes in.
 
Presumably it still sees the individual tapes as the media, not the whole partition? Eg the partition is the device, not the media?

We're backing up enough to fit everything uncompressed onto a single tape at the moment, but that will be expanding quite rapidly soon - so I'd like to get it on one tape per day really
 
Thats right, each partition is seen as a separate device and the media within the partition used as you want.

We have a 16-slot autoloader split into 4 partitions, with each partition seen as a separate device which you assign to the backup job. Nightly Backups use partition1 (slots 1 to 5), Weekly Backups (slots 6-10) and Monthly Backups (slots 11 to 15). The last partition is slot 16 with a cleaning tape assigned.
 
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