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Separating a monthly full backup from Weekly full, best practice?

  • 14 June 2021
  • 4 replies
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Userlevel 2
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We are using a tape environment for our backups. One of the issues i have with commvaults storage policy is that it doesn't really have a difference on how it does full backups. Our retention cycles are a daily backup (Differentials) of 7 days 1 cycle, weekly full 28 days 1 cycle, and a monthly full with 1095 days +. 

Currently with how the storage policy is set up it is running to the default, all the data is being dumped to one tape and usually has monthly, daily and weekly data on the same tape. I notice when i pull my monthlies i sometimes will see that the weekly fulls and daily are eating up space that could be used to fill more monthly fulls unto the tape.

I was wondering what would be the best practice to separate the monthly full away from the other backup retentions of the storage policy?  Would it be something along th3e lines of creating an aux copy in the storage policy and just copy the last weekly full to the aux copy to separate the monthly full from the other data? or is this something that can be done with the schedules i assign to the storage policy? When I select a schedule, under “Advanced” under the “Backup Task Options”, in the “Media” tab there are two options for Starting “New Media” and “Mark Media full on Sucess”. Would this also be a viable option, or would this create a new tape for each client associated to the schedule for its monthly full?

 

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Best answer by Mike Struening RETIRED 14 June 2021, 17:06

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Userlevel 7
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Great question and observation @TP_Erickson !

You have 2 options (3 if you count the Mark media as full/Use New Media which I find to not be best in your use case):

  1. You can set up an Incremental Storage Policy so all NON-fulls go to another Storage Policy (same library if you want)
  2. You can set up a Selective Aux Copy (so it only grabs Fulls) with the same library

Option 2 will require enough drives to copy from one tape and to another, so keep that in mind if you are all Tape with 1 drive.

Let me know if you have any follow up questions!

Userlevel 7
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Hi @TP_Erickson !  hope all is well!  Following up to confirm I answered your questions.

Thanks!

Userlevel 2
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Hey Mike, Sorry got busy at work. I believe option one might be the way to do . We already do an incremental storage policy on some of our stuff which separates the daily backups. We could sent the weekly full backups to that storage policy and have the monthly retention set to the regular storage policy. 

Whenever i tried the aux copy i always seem to create a bigger mess then i intended.

Thanks again for the help.

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +23

All good, @TP_Erickson !  I’ll assume this will work for you, though if it doesn’t, respond back and I’ll be here :nerd:

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