Backing up to which tape??? 2

[somejoe]

I've been examining the scheduled backup jobs. We have arcserve 2000 and a DLT7 tape library. I've been trying to figure out which backup goes on which tape.

I go to modify a job just to check it out. The source is one of our servers but for destination there is just an asteric, not a tape name. Any clues on how to figure out which days of the week are mapped to which tapes?


Thanks,

 

[TheLad]

Shouldn't it say which slot it is taking the tape from in the Arcserve log? "It's true, its damn true!"

 

[somejoe]

Thanks for the suggestion.

It should say where it is copying the data to, I think, but it doesn't. (I just took over this job. So I'm trying to figure out how it was setup.) Instead of giving a tape name on the destination field of the backup, it just has an asteric. I think I need to learn about media pools. I believe that is how it is done. But, now everytime, I try to look at the media pool. It crashes on me.

Any tips on backing up to a weekly media pool?

 

[yvfwc]

Go to reports and look at Media Pool Report, GFS Rotation Profile Report, & GFS Media prediction Report. These will tell you alot about the setup and what has happened so far.

Cheers,

Mark ;-)

 

[monkeylizard]

Can't say about AS2000, but AS6.61 has a Device Manager. That always displays the library with all of its slots and shows which tape is in which slot. Monkeylizard
-Isaiah 35-

 

[iandrewmartin]

Hey SomeJoe

Here is what I have setup for our jobs.

Dell DLT 7000 Tapevault 120 - seven slots
Using a day/tape rotation with a total of 31 tapes + 12 in reserve per year. (Each month we rotate out of the mix the Tape 1 tape [because there's one of those in every month] as a archived backup. Each tape is then advanced a day in the rotation and the new tape goes into the mix as tape 31. Every 2.5 years we rotate through out total tape inventory, to keep it fresh.

I made a single back up Job, saved it as the master job, then created individual day jobs to purposely allow me to track the tape on which a job resides.

To setup the DLT device I went to the device manager, clicked on the scsi object, clicked on the DLT device (in this case a Dell PV-120T-DLALT.

Right click the object, choose Device Group configuration.
From the list of buttons choose New and away you go.
Create a list of objects, I used Tuesday through Monday as my objects and then assigned slots 1-7 to thse day groups.

Once a week I change tapes, shut down the servers and restart them to Inventory the drives and then run a format. All that's required for their on going maintenance is to make sure that any changes to the Daily jobs are changed on the master job.

This may not be perfect for everyone, however it has worked successfully for us since November last year. We have a lot of data to back up and management wants to be able to go back beyond our theoretical 21 day limit (since 7 tapes are always in production, and there is a February with 28 days).

Hope this gives you some ideas to help you out.

Let me know if I can give some other advice. No expert, but I have had to figure all of this out on my own. So pardon any ignorance on my part.

Andrew

 

[somejoe]

All the advice has been helpful, but doesn't exactly help me with my problem.

I've stated before that I don't know how to control which tape the ARCserver2000 is backing up to because the destination for all scheduled jobs is an "*". Even though I've named each of my tapes, eg. (monday1, tuesday1, wednesday1, thursday1, friday1, monday2, tuesday2, wednesday2, thurday2, friday2). I am using a DLT 7 library that holds 6 data tapes and one cleaning tape. I swop tapes every monday.

Now the problem, my thursday backup went to my Wednesday1 tape when I wanted it to go to my Thursday1 tape and my friday backup went to my Thursday1 tape when I wanted it to go to my Friday1 tape. How will I fix this? I'm really perplexed. Any advice???

 

[iandrewmartin]

Somejoe;
I am not sure exactly how you want to have your tapes rotated through the drive. In my previous post I described my setup rotation.

However, I need to know how you are using your tapes.

With only six slots how are you backing up:

1 full and five incrementals?
More than one full and less than five incrementals?
6 full?

Now how are your jobs setup:
Single job, going to next tape in rotation?
Multiple jobs each going to a tape?
Something else?

The only way to force the jobs to go to the tapes you want are to force the jobs to go to the slots. This allows you to change tapes (Monday 1, 2, 3,...n) but have the jobs simply go directly to the slot.

To restore, all you have to do is go to the tape for the day used and restore it. Make sure your jobs are writing to the database to enable you to restore data with out a merge.

If you need more help please let me know.

Andrew

 

[WilkesME]

The "*" dictates that any suitable media found in that device group will be used. Suitable will depend upon how the job is set up, and the backup media options selected. Drop me your e-mail address and I'll try and elaborate.

Mark

 

[somejoe]

Let me start by saying thanks for your help. I hope this addition makes things a little clearer.

I have 6 back-up tapes and one cleaning tape in my DLT 7 library.

slot one holds Monday1 or Monday2
slot two holds Tuesday1 or Tuesday2
slot three holds Wednesday1 or Wednesday2
slot four holds Thursday1 or Thursday2
slot five holds Friday1
slot six holds Friday2
slot seven holds a cleaning tape

Every Monday I switch slots 1 through 4. If the have Monday1 thru Thursday1 I switch them to Monday2 thru Thursday2.

Slots 1 thru 4 (that is, all Monday thru Thursday) do differential backups. Slot's 5 and 6 (that is, Fridays) do a full backup.

I also do a full Month End backup. I have to swop tapes again to do that.

This doesn't seem like the best way to do back-up, but for now I'm just trying to keep things consistent with how they were when I picked up this job a month ago. It also allows for restore for a two week period.

All backup destination settings are "*". The repeat intervals is 14 days. At one point I changed the repeat interval on one of the scheduled jobs to 13 days. (The server had crashed and missed a day and I thought I was fixing it.) I think that was a big mistake. I believe the repeat interval was keeping the backup copying to the correct tape, ie Monday's backup to "Monday1" or "Monday2" tape etc.

I changed the repeat interval back to 14 days for all the backup scheduled jobs, but now the tapes might be out if sync. It backed up alright last night. I guess all I can do is wait untill next week (when the 13th/14th day roles around) and see what happens. If it screws up the backup (at backs up thursdays backup to "Friday1" tape, I don't know what I'll do to fix it.

 

[WilkesME]

Ok - I'm assuming your running Arcserve2000?

Slot 7 can be designated as a cleaning slot in device setup, so that can be forgotten about (?)

I would recommend that you set a new job up as a rotation one, and use a media pool - let Arcserve sort out the slots.

Go to the media pools screen, and create a new pool - call it something appropriate like "weekly". Leave the serial number parameters as they are, and set Min number to 9, and retention time to 13 days (you may have to play around with this a bit, but that's a good place to start - you'll be able to see if media is being put back into scratch too soon by examining the pool contents). If you've got any spare tapes to populate the pool with, that'd be better than using your current tapes. If you're unsure, you'll need to inventory the new tapes in device manager, label them (call them anything you like), but assign them to the new pool. Make a note of the serial numbers it assigns them, and physically put a label on them yourself. You should then see them in the scratch set section of the media pool you created.

Start a new backup job, and make the selections that you want backing up.
In the destination, point it to the "*" as before.
Under the schedule tab, select "use rotation scheme", and then select "5-Day weekly differential backup, full backup on Friday"

I don't recommend this until Friday, as even though you've set it as differential, Arcserve thinks it knows better and will always make the first ever run a "full".

When it runs, it will automatically relabel the tape as "Monday" or whatever day it is. It won't attempt to over-write the previous Monday tape as that will still be in the save set and therefore protected. You may need to go slightly higher than just 10 tapes in the pool, to have a few available in the scratch set. After the backup, if you examine the device manager, you can see which tape (in which slot) has been used, and remove it from the autoloader if you want to.


The Monthly

This one's a bit more tricky & I've had to think about this! There's a certain amount of manual intervention involved I'm afraid. Create a new pool, and call it temp. Get 12 tapes, format them with a serial number and assign them to this temp pool. Then delete the pool. Physically label the tapes as before. Unfortunately, this is the only way to get them labelled with a serial number which makes for easier admin. Assuming you would run it on the last Sunday of every month. Set the job destination as before (*), under schedule, use a custom schedule, repeat method is ""Weeks of month", select the "last" check box, and then "Sunday" as the Day of Week. When you are ready to run the job, always erase the target tape that will be used, erase it using the device manager (Quick erase - media label only). Then in the options for the job, change the "Options for first media" to "Overwrite same media name or Blank media" - thus it will have to pick up the tape you've just erased (it's blank), and all of the other tapes that may be in the loader are in a separate media pool and thus protected.

If any of this doesn't make sense, let me know (Mark@AGSolutions.co.uk) and I'll try & clear it up.

Regards
Mark