Using an Autochanger !!!Help!!!

[obryant32]

Okay, so I just purchased Legato Networker and an Exabyte VXA-2 Autopak 1X7 autoloader. The exabyte product holds 7 tapes in a magazine with one drive on the inside. What I'm trying to do is use a different tape for each day of the week and do incremental backups. But for some reason, it does the entire backup 5 times, once on each tape...EVERY NIGHT! Any suggestions?

 

[x2shy]

Create a pool for every day of the week.
Create a schedule for every day of the week
Create a client for each day of the week and place it in that daypool.
Set each daypool to use dayschedule
So...

Create Schedule:
MondaySchedule (Incremental on Monday, skip all other days)
TuesdaySchedule (Inc Tuesday, skip all other days)
...
FridaySchedule (Inc Friday, skip all other days)

Create Pools
Label one tape per Pool
Tape 1 = MondayPool
Tape 2 = TuesdayPool
...
Tape 5 = FridayPool

Create Groups:
MondayGroup to use MondaySchedule and MondayPool
TuesdayGroup to use TuesdaySchdule and TuedayPool
...
FridayGroup to use FridaySchedule and FridayPool

Create Client:
ClientA = "All" savesets, in the Monday group.
ClientA = "All" savesets, in the Tuesday group.
...
ClientA = "All" savesets, in the Friday group.


That is how you do it but why would you?
Maybe you are still thinking in the Arcserve/BackUpExec mentality. Legato doesn't use that whole "Son/Father/Grandfather" scheme.
Also, when are planing on doing a Full backup?
If you are not planning on taking your tapes off site then just leave them in one pool, one group, one schedule.
If you want to take your tapes out and put in new ones each week then just write a little script to make all tapes marked as "Full" at the end of the week.
Or do it manually, 5 tapes would take 2 minutes. Up to you.
I hope this helps.

 

[obryant32]

How exactly do I create a client for each day of the week? I thought a client was one machine. Suppose one of my servers is named "data" and I've loaded the client software onto it. I can't then have a datamonday client, datatuesdayclient, etc. I've tried. Maybe your suggesting that I backup a different client each night. Can you clarify? Thanks

 

[x2shy]

Sorry, if you read further down it explains it better.
After you have created the monday group.
Create a client "data" and put it in the Monday pool
Create a client "data" and put it in the Tuesday pool.
etc.
Make sense?

 

[obryant32]

Well, I did everything that you said and for some reason, it backs up to all of the tapes, each night. So, when I got in this morning and took a look at the tapes, Monday and Tuesday were at 21% while Wednesday through Friday were at 18%. I was expecting to have only the Tuesday tape used last night. What could have caused that? By the way, thank you very much for your help so far! I'm almost there. By the way, I set it so that I do Full backups on Friday and I have a rotation of Friday tapes that I keep off site which is why I wanted to set it up this way.