Backup tape reuse strategies?

First of all Thank God I don't have that kind of problem.

The problem you have is a little strange in that way that the cost of
tape compared to the cost of the time you spend on minimizing the tape
cost, it would be more easy, secure and cost less just to buy the
tapes you need.

In our small shop we use NetBackup Datacenter as backupsoftware (good
software, ok support, you can trust it and it has the features most
people need.
On the hardware side we use a StorageTek L-series library and
StorageTek 9940B tapedrives.

Basicly our tapemanagement is based on the standard features in
NetBackup (no fancy stuff at all)
In the different policies we configure how long to keep a given
backup, and when there is no longer a valid backup on the tape
NetBackup uses it again.
The only real planning on minimizing the numbers of tape we use are on
the number of days we keep the backups. I found out that we used less
tapes on a daily basis when we used the same period for all backups.
In the beginning it seemed a little strange to me, but basicly it's
because we didn't fill all the tapes.

We run around 250 backups a day (could be more since we don't count
them) and the total amount written to tape is in the area of 1 TB a
day.

Compared to what the backupsoftware, backuphardware and the people to
run the backups cost, tapecost is a minor issue (I think we pay less
then EUR 100 a tape)

If I wanted to keep some of my backups for a longer period I would
duplicate them to a seperate volume pool (standard feature in NBU but
I don't know about you software) or use vaulting and let NetBackup do
it automaticly)

It seems to me that you want to do some realy fancy backup stuff with
a low cost software and hardware installation. And the only way to get
that to work is to use a lot of manpower for it.

/johnny

On 28 Jul 2003 14:43:18 -0700, simonf@simonf.com (Simon) wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>We have a centralized backup system of several dozen machines. My boss
>is cracking down on tape costs, so we are trying to come up with a
>strategy to recycle old backup tapes. The problem is that it's not
>easy to do it because the backup software (Time Navigator) writes
>files from different machines and from different dates onto the same
>tape. Thus, if I want to keep a full backup only of a certain subset
>of machines from a year ago, it's very time-consuming to track down
>the tapes involved.
>
>Obviously, the software allows to backup each host to a different set
>of tapes, but managing all this becomes hard very quickly, and it
>would waste tapes anyway. I can also set cut-off dates where I close
>all tapes and start anew, say, each month, but this also adds to the
>management time and tape wastage.
>
>Has anyone run into this problem (ease-of-use vs precise
>accountability) with backup tapes, especially regarding tape reuse?
>This would probably arise with any kind of centralized backup
>solution...
>
>Thanks,
>Simon Ilyushchenko