Changing tapes each day

[Jeph]

I have a VXA drive provided by Compaq for a Compaq Evo PC it came with Retrospect Express 5.5.163. I am trying to do a simple backup strategy of using a different tape for every day of the week leaving the PC on overnight to back up at 2am each day. I also use weekly tapes and monthly tapes in the cycle to keep data older than one week, 12 tapes in total.

 

It ran OK the first week, as the tapes were blank. The next week the automatic backup would not start as the tape already had data on it. It works OK if you erase the tape before use but I should not have to erase the tapes every day. Can I not just set up the software to overwrite the tapes automatically without user intervention so I can just change the tapes each day and let the PC get on with it automatically.

 

 

 

I have read the users guide about backup strategies and backup actions but it makes very little sense in relation to my simple one tape per day strategy.

 

 

 

I would use another backup strategy if I could be assured that I could get back to any file from any day of the week, or the last three weeks, or the last 3 months, if anyone could suggest one. I would not be happy using the same tape each day in case of tape failure.

 

 

[AmyJ]

The following tutorial on creating a 5-day rotation should help:

 

 

 

http://www.dantz.com/index.php3?SCREEN=kbase&ACTION=KBASE&id=27482

[Jeph]

Thanks For that AmyC. But after checking out the price of VXA tapes and their capacity (expensive but very high capacity) I would like to change the strategy to append more than one days worth of backups on to one tape. I have calculated that I should be able to hold 6 copies of my data on one tape. Is it possible, say to backup Monday, Wednesday and Friday onto one tape and Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday onto another tape, and use a third tape to hold a number of Sundays backups on? this way I would still be able to get back to any day of the week.