Video: Setting up backup life and tape labeling policies. (4042560)

Date: 7/22/05
Affected NV Version: 7.x
OS Version: any
Plugin version: N/A
Application version: N/A

Description: Setting up backup life and tape labeling policies

Please see the video below:

The backup cycles required are as follows:

3 tape sets comprising of :
[1] daily - 6 tapes - lifespan 1 week
[2] weekly - 5 tapes - lifespan 1 month
[3] monthly - 12 tapes - lifespan 1 year

To create these cycles the following tasks need to be done.

[1] Define your media groups within NetVault (i.e.. daily, weekly, monthly). This is done when you physically label the tapes through device manager. A media group is created by applying properties to a single tape with the group name specified within the group label dialogue.
Once this has been completed for one tape the media group will appear within media management, it will also form part of the group label list within the media properties dialogue, to create another media group simply label another tape within device manager properties with a different group label.
For example, load a blank tape go into device manager select device tape loaded on right click mouse to bring up submenu select properties from the submenu enter the following media label group label.

[2] Define/modify your backup jobs within the backup dialogue/browser. Once you have created your media groups you may specify their use within the target & advanced option tab within the backup dialogue.

Target tab
The Media Options section allows you to allocate a specific media group for use by that backup. The group label pull down menu will contain all the media groups that you have previously defined within the device manager. Select this option & specifying a media group means that this particular job will only use tapes from within the media group specified.
General options gives you the ability to write protect the entire tape after the specific backup has completed until that saveset has expired from the database & it also has the option ensure this backup is the first on the media. So if you wanted to ensure that only one particular save set resided on the tape you would enable both these options.
However if you wanted to put a series of backups to a single or multiple tapes contiguously you would enable the 'Ensure this backup is the first on the media option' for the first backup job & enable the 'Protect media from further writes after backup' on the last job.

Advanced Options
The advanced options tab allows you to set the backup lifespan for the save set generated from the job. This is set from within the Backup Life pane - and allows to specify the amount of time that the backup will be protected from overwrite in terms of days/weeks/years & number of full backups using this job instance. After that period is exhausted the saveset will become expired & be automatically removed from the NetVault database. When all the savesets on a piece of media are expired then the tape is automatically marked for re-use.

An example of implementing this for a single backup job to run on a daily cycle to a single tape. This tape will only contain this particular backups data & be overwritten once a week.

[1] define the select set from the backup dialogue
[2] target tab - media options select group label 'daily'
- general options select 'Protect media from further writes after backup' select 'Ensure this backup is first on the media'
[3] advanced options tab - backup life select discard after 6 days.