Duplicate tapes during or after backup

[L4ts]

We do a full backup on Fridays which goes off-site. Rest of the week (Monday-Thursday) we do incremental backups.
We recently decided that we would like to keep a full backup on-site also. Because it takes too long to do full backups during the week, I was wondering if we can duplicate the tapes we backup on Fridays so we'll have two copies of each?

 

[frdba]

We had looked into this also. If I remember correctly there was not a way to do this, unless you wanted to restore the tape to an alternate location, then perform another backup on the restored data. There are businesses out there(check with the company you use for your off-site storage) that will copy tapes for you but when I checked with ours,they were pretty pricey.

If you had the space you could do a copy job to disk, then when time permits back that up to tape and send it off.

I never found a good way to do this since the options were either too time consuming, or too expensive.

 

[L4ts]

Thanks for your reply. I think I will wait until next month for Storage Expo to get few ideas. just too bad that this option isn't available right now.

 

[davidmichel]

If you have 2 tape drives tape RAID 1 mirroring could be used but better to just use tapecopy.

If you have only 1 tape drive then for this job do the backup to FSD File System Device. Then use tapecopy to the tape drive and run that job twice.