Arcserve 2000 - all tapes in spanned set needed for restore?

[wallst32]

Hello,

Let's say I was to format 10 tapes and label them as "DEV". All of these tapes were then filled with incremental and full backups for a total of 200 sessions.

Now if tapes 1, 5, and 9 all failed for some reason, could I still restore any "complete" sessions from tapes 2-4, 6-8, and 10?

I like to span over as many tapes as possible so I don't need to change tapes as often. But I'm wondering if there is also a downside to that.

TIA

 

[Cyklops]

Yes, you can restore any session you like. This system will only fail when you want to do full system restores which require certain sessions to be able to do a complete restore

regards

 

[davidmichel]

As long as the whole session is on a tape it can be merged and restored.

For a session that spans tapes, data can be merged (if a sequential merge is used) and restored from the first part of the session. For the last part of the session located on the next tape, data can not be merged or restored.

BTW - There is no need to format all the tapes. Just format the first tape and leave the rest blank. When it spans it will have to format the tape again anyways. This is necessary so that each tape will have not only the same name but also the same ID.