Tape-Backup suggestions

[niceAZ]

Hello

I currently tasked with reworking our PBS-Tape-Backups. We have 19 tapes that can be used for this rotation. The tapes are currently "used" in old media-sets which are not needed any longer.

The setup we would like to run would be the following:

- Weekly full backups for some datastores to a new media pool -> swap out the tape(s) for new ones after
- Weekly full backups for some other datastore to another media pool -> swap out the tape(s) for new ones after
- Run this until all tapes have full backups on them and then overwrite the first one again

What would be the recommended configuration for running this setup?

Any help is appreciated!

 

[AmateurProgrammer]

For the first two points you could set the media pool allocation policy to always. For the last one AFAIK only viable solution is to tweak the retention period for the dataset such that the oldest ones start to expire just before you would run out of tapes -> the tapes do a full cycle.

 

[niceAZ]

Thanks for the reply!

I agree about the retention tweaking - that won't be an issue IMO.

I am unsure about the "always"-policy though. We have multiple datastores that need to be backed up. If I set the media pool to always, every backup job writes on a new tape.. ideally we would like to write all weekly backups from all jobs to as many tapes as are needed and then put them in storage.

Is there a way to backup multiple datastore with a single job? Or to write continuously onto a tape for a certain period of time?