reusing or recycling tape media

[rkfoster]

I am used to a scenario with another tape backup product where you can use a set of 31 tapes, one for each day of the month, and simply cycle through these over and over again until you need new tapes. In other words, on the 2nd of the month you use tape 2, on the 3rd tape 3 etc. Or you can simply "recycle" a tape once the backup data on it is older than three months or so.

 

However, with Retrospect it seems that it is only possible to endlessly add tapes to a backup set ad infinitum. I don't see a way to recycle or reuse only one tape in the backup set. I can only recycle the entire set of tapes and start over again. I would like to be able to just recycle one tape at a time from the beginning and reuse the tapes as I go. The oldest tapes would be recycled and reused by the same Backup Set.

 

Is it possible to do this with Retrospect?

 

[AmyJ]

Create 31 backup sets and add them to your script. Each set should probably be named the day of the month for clarity - Eg: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 or 1st Day, 2nd Day, etc.

 

In your script, you'll need 31 repeating interval schedules as follows:

 

Every month on the the first, Recycle backup to set Day 1

Every month on the the second, Recycle backup to set Day 2

Every month on the the third, Recycle backup to set Day 3

and so on...

[rkfoster]

Amy,

 

I'm sorry, the 31 day tape scenario is misleading since I haven't used that method in a while, it was just an example. Inserting a new tape in the drive on a daily basis is too much of a hassle unless you have an autoloader.

 

My real question is how to recycle a single tape, in whatever scenario you might use. From what you say, it requires having a separate Backup Set for each tape. If I had a weekly tape then I would need a separate Backup Set for each week.

 

Doesn't this present a problem though when it come to restoring a file or set of files? How does Retrospect know which tape to use for the restore? I can determine that I used a particular tape during that week and have Retrospect restore the file from that tape using that Backup Set. But I thought the idea of a Backup Set was to have that file information in the Backup Set so I could easily find and restore a file. With this method I pretty much have to keep a record of which Backup Set was used when, and pray that no one else screws up the tapes, in order to find the right file to restore. Am I misunderstanding how this works?

 

 

[AmyJ]

If you don't know which backup set contains the file(s) you want to restore, you can use a search restore (Search for files and folders) which will allow you to search across multiple backup sets. From the search results you can choose the file(s) you want to restore and Retrospect will ask for the appropriate tapes.