Reddwarf Posted August 25, 2003 Report Share Posted August 25, 2003 Hi All, I want to try and achieve this: Make Retrospect backup to tape (local and clients) and after 6 or so backups remove the oldest backup from the tape and continue as it would normaly do. This way I can leave the tape in the drive and there will always be backups, only not forever, that would require to many tapes and I don't want to feed the tapedrive with tapes every once in a while. I know that sounds lazy and/or dangerous but this is what I want. The goal is to have a backup on tape and the backups always succeed and I never need to replace the tape (unless it's broken of course), a set it and forget it backup sollution. Can this be done? Cheers, Steven Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted August 26, 2003 Report Share Posted August 26, 2003 Hi Unfortunately "no" ,you cannot remove a single backup from your backup set. You can schedule recycle backups to periodically erase the tape and start from scratch. This leaves you open to losing data though. Your best bet is a 2 set rotation- recycle one set one week and then recycle the other set the following week. Manual labor changing the tapes for sure but it is the only way to be really safe. Trust me your efforts will pay off once you need to restore something. Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reddwarf Posted August 27, 2003 Author Report Share Posted August 27, 2003 Hi natew, Thanks for the answer, appreciated. Do you think this would be a good feature to have? I would love to stick in a tape and forget about it. I'll try what you suggested, although for my purposes this might prove to be a bit to much. It's not that I don't want to but it's on #123 of things to do/remember Cheers, Steven Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ecrm Posted August 28, 2003 Report Share Posted August 28, 2003 My 2cents, even though you probably weren't asking for them,... I've found that the "set it and forget it" approach really only works for appliances (ala' the rotisserie chicken thing or maybe stoves or something) and that's probably because they don't get firmware upgrades, patches, multiple simultaneous users, or asked to do 20 different things all at once like software, servers, desktops, and networks. Freedom from "computer anything" problems comes from constant vigilance. I know that means many days of "yup it's still working today" but the devil is in the details, in this case logs, events, stats, audits, VERIFY's etc. If you let it slide it WILL break. Tape media has many many ways to fail and just presuming it's there and forever safe will just byte you in arse one day. Your situation sounds a bit like mine as I'm sure the same for many persons using this forum, your doing more with less, and just because staff may be reduced "IT Services" whatever form they take #123, haven't. A common mistake among management types that really don't understand "IT" is to believe that because every thing seems to be running OK that the person(s) managing it must not have anything to do. WRONG!!! All things hardware and software have a tendency to break, especially when something is changed, so if it's running OK than someone is actually working pretty hard at it. Sorry, I'm running on... I just wanted to let you know that from experience if you completely forget your backup on a regular basis that there is a high probability that your restores will fail outside of the most of simplistic of setups, and since your posting in this particular forum I doubt that describes you. gl -dave Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted August 28, 2003 Report Share Posted August 28, 2003 Hi It would be a handy feature but it just is not practical to implement especially with tape backups. Imagine going back through your video tape of the super bowl, deleting only the comercials and then fitting pieces of another program perfectly into the blank spaces. Granted a computer could do this better but not efficiently at all. All of your restores depend on your previous backups to some small degree. erasing just parts of the data would be rough. If you set up your scripts right you will find media rotation can be pretty easy to stick to. Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reddwarf Posted August 28, 2003 Author Report Share Posted August 28, 2003 Hi Dave, Thanks for the reply! I understand all the things you are saying, honest, but the backups I have to do involves such simple tasks (the amount of data is not large, specific data on server, # users is low) that I can get away with this. In fact, I run retrospect for 2 years now and the only time I have to look at retrospect is to check if the tape isn't full. If it is, I'll erase it and start again (on a second tape that is , preserving data in case thing go wrong (as you stated, things can go wrong from time to time)). This has always worked for me, without fail. I feel so comfortable with this setup that there's only one thing anoying and bothering me: the fact that I need to erase a tape and start from scratch. It's perfectly acceptable to me and my users if backups can be restored with a maximum of 7 days hindsight. Thus all the backups would fit on 1 tape and keep on roling . For clarity : I know a tape can break or that the drive stops from functioning, no problems with that. Simply e-mail me the error and I'll undertake some action to correct that problem. I understand that this practice makes some people shake their heads and think "that *will* go wrong, you'll be so sorry..." and I understand this. It's just not for me, the normal strict backup procedures don't apply here, realy. Cheers, Steven Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reddwarf Posted August 28, 2003 Author Report Share Posted August 28, 2003 Hi Nate, Thanks for the reply. I understand now that retrospect won't/can't do it like I want to. Any suggestions on what to use for me to achieve this? Apart from burning incence and taking showers in holywater in prevention of backup failures I would love to do this and any piece of software that allows me to do this is fine by me. It would need to be able to backup client computers (win & mac) as well. Cheers, Steven Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mikee Posted August 29, 2003 Report Share Posted August 29, 2003 1 Backup to a file backup set for 7 days. 2 Recycle the tape. 3 Transfer file backup set onto a tape. 4 Recycle the file backup set. 5 GoTo 1 Mikee Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reddwarf Posted September 1, 2003 Author Report Share Posted September 1, 2003 Mike, Hang on, your onto something here Slight variation on your method: 1 Backup to a file backup set for 7 days, set to Recycle on day 1 in script. 2 Transfer file backup set onto a tape by automation and be sure that the script doing this is Recycling this particular backup. 3 GoTo 1 automagicly Big question is, can you tell retrospect to recycle a backup script on run x and the same fo when doing a run of the script, period. Can this be made so and won't it influense other backups tht might already be on the tape (sporadic, one-off backup's)? Could this work and be totaly automatic? Of so than we might have a winner here! Cheers, Steven Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arsenic Posted January 16, 2004 Report Share Posted January 16, 2004 2 backup devices with 2 backup sets and alternate recycle jobs. In my case an autoloader with sets 1 and 2 (7 tapes each) that alternate recycle jobs. Or 2 tape drives, or 1 tape drive and one file backup set as stated, but that leaves you vulnerable to losing it all if you run only one machine and it blows up. I think it really depends on what he's backing up and what he has to back it up to. It is doable, but you really need 2 backup sets. This is true with any backup solution. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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