How to go about setting up Offsite Tape Backup

This entirely depends on your resources.  If those tape drives are in constant use, duplicating tapes will just jam more those resources (at least 2 drives). Exporting out should not be a problem as long as you have place where to export them and transport them safely along with media management in place. Nowadays, at least for backups, this sort of approach is abandoned, but with tapes I guess that's what you do.  And since you have LTO2 (as stated), that's not going to be face melting operation for sure...

Hi, Thanks for your reply.

Can you explain what you mean when you say  "Exporting out should not be a problem as long as you have place where to export them and transport them safely along with media management in place...."

What do you mean by exporting out and transport and media management? (are these networker processes?)

-do you mean clone and then eject the tape? what do you mean by place to export them? you mean free slots? or you talking about a fire proof safe to store the tapes?

We are also thinking of replacing some of the drives with LTO5 whoch should then free up some slots.

Yes, this tape is old technology and will be replaced with datadomain later.

ecl wrote: Can you explain what you mean when you say  "Exporting out should not be a problem as long as you have place where to export them and transport them safely along with media management in place...." What do you mean by exporting out and transport and media management? (are these networker processes?)

Well, I know of example where tapes are being exported and kept in trunk of the car.  That's not some once upon the time example, but rather current one   Of course, it is extreme, but still you must ensure that your tapes are secured otherwise why exporting them out (outside library). If, and when transported, you must keep an eye on having media managemnt (location and transport in case of restore/DR) in place with all auth mechanisms in place.

If you plan to go with DD, as mentioned, you will most likely replicate data which, from my point of view, gives you remote site/appliance protection, but not out of site (since data is not exported).  If that is not needed, then you don't have to export tapes today neither.

Oh right I get you now and thanks for our reply.

What I was looking for was options for quickest way to get an offsite tape backup set. Tape slots already all full so whats best option?

buy another dem/cem with extra 2 drives then populate with new blank tapes and setup a job to clone each tape?

If exporting tapes is an option, within house, go for it.  Once you move to disk option (eg. Data Domain) you won't use much tapes at all (perhaps for long term backups). Exporting tapes out is not such a big deal and takes couple of minutes (to more, depending on size and speed and of course location).

Hi, does tape clone take long time e.g. how long to clone for LTO2? Thanks

Hi ECL,

Well cloning doesent take extra time or anything as such, its a process in which data is read from one tape and written onto another tape, the only fact of concern to you should be ,cloning will keep two drives from your environment busy for the time its running.....and as per the details shared above it appears like your library is busy all the time taking backup........you will have to do cloning in non Backup running hours .......again completion of cloning depends on the data thats getting backedup daily.....which in turn will be cloned..

I really don't remember, but if you are using 2 drives on same system then your limit will cime from either:

- speed of HBA (be aware if both drives share same HBA that they will also share pipe)

- speed of drive (unless you hit HBA/PCI limitation you should be able to drive those drives up to max)

Hi All, Tape library is "currently full with over 100 tapes" and practically backing up all the time.

As its "full" there is no spare slots to put in new blank tapes and also drives are always busy doing backup jobs.

So are you sugguesting best to extend the tape library with extra drives and tape slots so it can also do cloning of all the tapes?

If you put your offsite tapes in their own pool you can eject the "full" tapes from a script (you'll need the library address of your tape library and the media pool name of the offsite pool).  This is a script for linux.

mminfo -a -r "volume,location,pool,volretent" -q "full" |grep OffsitePoolName |grep LibraryAddress |grep -v "expired">ejectlist.txt

cat "ejectlist.txt" | while read TapeNumber
do
echo "Ejecting $TapeNumber..."
/usr/sbin/nsrjb -j LibraryAddress -w $TapeNumber
done

I'm not sure what retention you use, but you can always export out full tapes and put in new tapes - even on daily basis if this is some tape library where people are and can pick up the tapes and place them where necessary.

That's what we ended up doing because we'd cycle through a whole lot of tapes during the week.

I've been using VTL since 2006 and I can't tell you what kind of relief that was compared to PTL. I recently switched to Data Domain and tested both VTL and DD Boost devices and I have to admit results were better than I expected.  From operational point of view, for pure backups, tape is overhead.  For archiving, I would argue not (depending what sort of restore requirements and compliancy you would have).

Hi thanks for all your helpful advice so far. But I am still not sure what the best option it to quickly implement a offsite backup rotation.

Currently, "NO" tapes have ever been removed and the retention is 30 days with over 40 jobs running taking full backups and incremental backups on over 100 tapes in various media pools (so ALL tapes are in use).

There is "NO" free slots to put in blank tapes for cloning. The backup team are telling me it is difficult to implement a offsite backup rotation as all tapes are either in use or become part of the expiring backup set ready to be over written.

I am still waiting for a solution from the backup team hence posted on this forum to see what are the easiest options to get a offsite backup rotation in place where all tapes slots are in use in the tape library.

An option I think that maybe possible is to expand the PTL with extra drives and tape slots for new blank tapes and then modify the existing jobs to clone as each tape is filled?