Switching from DAT to LTO

[ankle]

I have been using ARCserve with DAT tapes and GFS. The latest DAT system I am using supports DAT72 with a 6 tape autoloader. It was getting harder to get everything backed up and the backup window was getting longer and longer. I implemented disk staging and that helped some. I finally purchased an 8 tape LTO4 autoloader. I will most likely implement the mailslot and use 1 slot for cleaning tape. So that leaves 6 slots for tapes. I probably will not need more than 400GB for full backups. Incrementals will vary, but rarely exceed 30-40GB.

Now I am trying to decide how to set up the backup jobs. I am currently running ARCserve 11.5 SP3, but will most likely upgrade to 12.0 SP1 once I get all the planning done. Although GFS works great, I don't think I want to continue to use GFS because of the number of tapes required. Since I already have LTO4 cartridges, I would like to append the incrementals to use the tapes to full storage capacity, but then overwrite when allowed (after weekly). Should I implement a Custom(non GFS) M-Th incremental with Full on Friday? Or should I create individual jobs for each day pointing to a particular tape slot and then purchase some LTO3s for the weekly and monthly backups which I can switch out manually as needed.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

 

[davidmichel]

GFS does support append dailies perhaps that will do what you want.

 

[ankle]

OK, so if I append the dailys, when will I know to put in a new tape cartridge? For dailys, I am used to 1-2 tapes per backups. For weekly/monthly, we were up to 5-6 tapes. I am just not accustomed to appending backup sets to media.

Can you append weeklys and monthlys? If not, I guess I need to get some smaller cartridges as I don't want to waste the space on the LTO4s.

thanks again.

 

[hemps37]

If you use a GFS job with staging, you can set the staging to submit a tape copy job on hold if no media is found and this will allow you to add new media to the drive then just submit the job. Daily Inc will right to the same tape until it is full then switch to the next one when full. As far as weekly backups they will right to a different tape than the incs. At least that's how I have it set. Prob not to have the full and the incs on the same tape anyways as you could lose a full weeks backup if the tape gets damaged or goes missing.

 

[ankle]

Thanks for the advice. I probably will not do anything until the new year, but I will look into my settings again then,