GFS Rotation Scheme

First, you have to create your Media pools.  You want to create 3 media pools: one for daily backups, one for weekly backups and one for monthly backups.  For each media pool, set the overwrite protection period accordingly; the settings I use are 6 days for dailies, 4 weeks for weeklies and 51 weeks for monthlies.  You will use 4 tapes for daily backups (Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, for example, assuming you do your weekly backup on Fridays and no backups over the weekend), 4 tapes for weekly backups (Weekly 1, 2, 3, and 4, since some months have 5 weeks, assuming you run your monthly backup on the last Friday of the month), and 12 tapes for monthly backups. Now, if you want to run your monthly backups actually on the last day of the month as a separate backup rather than using the last Friday backup of each month, then you need one additional tape, since you'll need a Weekly 5 tape for those months that have 5 weeks.

Then, you would set up jobs to run at the required intervals - for daily backups, I create a differential backup job, for weeklies and monthlies I use a full backup. When you create the job template, you select the media pool that corresponds to the job.  This sets the rentention period automatically when the tape is used.

Ooops - that is, "retention period" not "rentention period."  That extra finger gets in the way sometimes ;-)

Hi

Thanks for responding.

Please forgive me if this is a silly question, but would I need to create 3 backup jobs as well or one backup job and changing the tapes accordingly.

You would be creating 3 different backup jobs, because the schedule for actually running the job is set when you create the job. Since you will have 3 different schedules (daily for M-Th, weekly for Fri, and monthly for last day of month), you need 3 different jobs.

Backup Exec 10d allows you to set up job selection lists and job templates to use to create your jobs, and I generally use this method (instead of manually creating each job individually) because it saves time initially when setting up the jobs and it also comes in really handy when you need to change only certain parameters for a job, or you need to edit the selection list and then apply it to all of the jobs.  I create one basic job selection list for all full system backups, whether they be differential, incremental or full, daily or weekly or monthly.  On the selection list, you select all of the resources (computers and the drives, folders and files on them, as well as Exchange or SQL databases, etc.) that you want to back up on a regular basis.  In the job selection list you also configure the user name(s) and password(s) the system will use to connect to those resources.  Then, you can create your own job templates, or edit the default ones that are provided by Backup Exec. The job template is used to configure the specifics of the job such as backup tape drive, media pool, selection list, how to handle open files, etc., for each job.  Although you could use one job template to handle all 3 types of jobs, I usually create a separate job template for each type of backup, because I find it less confusing when I need to change the options for just one of the three types of backups.  Then, you tell the system to create a job using the template and you set the schedule for the job.  

One last silly question, seeing that there are so many tapes, how are the tapes allocated to the media pool after the pool is created.

Thanks

Hi Gang

Thanks for all the assistance thus far, yesterday afternoon I followed all the steps and scheduled the daily backup to run.   However when I come into the office this morning to check the status I noticed that the job is still active and is asking for the media to be loaded.  The tape was inserted from yesterday afternoon.  Did I do something wrong.

I am using a 36/72GB 4mm Tape and the job is approximately 45GB.

Thanks

The question is....did the tape fill up, or did the backup job not start at all, indicating that the tape was not recognized?  If the tape filled up, which is possible, you may not have set up your job to use hardware compression.  Check the job settings and make sure that hardware compression is set to be used (HINT - edit the job template, if you used one, not the job itself). If the backup job didn't start at all, it's possible that (1) the tape is bad or was physically write-protected; (2) there is a problem with the controller that the tape drive is connected to; or (3) the tape has been used before and needs to be erased before BE can write to it.

Hi

The job is being registered as active, with the byte count complete the the backup job size.  The job had been setup with hardrware compression and if not found use software compression.

I will try erasing the tape for this afternoon job before it runs to see if that solves the problem.  Should the tapes be set to overwritable.