I would like to discuss following issue. In the content of the backup subclient there is a bunch of VMs. Unfortunately, some of the VMs are from time to time disabled from backup, some of them are powered off, some of them can not be snapshotted due to SRM. It leads to the problems with aging of the backup jobs mainly due to cycle rules.
My question is how to handle this situation and to enable data aging of backup jobs on tapes when VMs in the vcenter cannot be backed up for some time. As per my assumption, the only solution is to set retention cycle to 0. What is your approach for such circumstances?
Best answer by drPhil
Hi @Laurent, If I understand well, "spool" tape has no retention, but data can stay on the tape until they are overwritten? It is an interesting approach indeed.
In this situation, backup are performed directly to tape, or is it a tape copy?
If it’s backup to tape, setting 0 for cycles could be risky, as you could not be able to restore from tapes if for some reason you do not have the full available..
If it’s a tape copy, then spool copy could be a solution?
Hi @Laurent , it is a tape copy = secondary copy, that has a tape library as a destination. Could you please describe how spool copy works? As per quick research, spool copy has no retention. Then, what is a reason for having a copy without any retention?
hi @drPhil I use this setting on some locations where the tape library is small, and people have to rotate/change tape pools each week, This way we always make sure we have a copy of backups to tape, and no issues from one client on a tape that do not match its cycles (as it could have been disabled), preventing the whole tape to be used.
Also if people are not on site (like, Covid lockdown, just as an example, or bank holidays) to rotate tapes, then it would overwrite the tape sets already in the drive, as in our strategy, our tape copy is only to be used in case of crypto issue on our disk primary, or disk failure of primary..
Of course it’s not 100% bulletproof, but it saves us more than it leaks so far 😀
Hi @Laurent, If I understand well, "spool" tape has no retention, but data can stay on the tape until they are overwritten? It is an interesting approach indeed.
hi @drPhil , yes, some of those features require to upgrade to appear..
Of course I would recommend you to upgrade, but jumping your prod from .19 to .24 could have side effects on your environments.. 😉
Regarding spool copy, it can be quite risky to use it, because from my understanding of this feature, as soon as a backup job is copied, then it is pruned :
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