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Archiving .BKF files...

Updated: 22 May 2010 | 5 comments
Dr. Phil Leonard's picture
Dr. Phil Leonard
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Once a month I take a daily backup tape out of rotation and archive it.  The problem is that the "media" used (read: .bkf files) are recylced within BE and therefore, when I go to restore my archive tape, say 4 months down the road, BE complains and I have to do this whole convoluted work-around to get the archived .BKF files to catalog.
 
My issue is that I don't want the archived "media" to occupy the disk space, but I need to keep the media names around so I can catalog correctly.  Basically, I don't want to reuse the media names... 
 
I guess I could create a new backup job for this purpose and use a different media set, but again, I don't want the monthly archived .BKF files to accumulate and take up disk space.
 
Could I retire the media, and delete the .BKF files?
 
Anybody doing anything similar, or have any thoughts?
 
Thanks!
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Ken Putnam's picture
04
May
2007
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Ken Putnam
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Rather than doing a standard COPY backup of the BKF files you could do a DUPLICATE job.
 
You could then let Backup Exec go ahead and recycle the BKF files, because you can restore directly from tape

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Dr. Phil Leonard's picture
04
May
2007
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Dr. Phil Leonard

Well, I remember trying a duplicate job when I first set this up, and I think it just took too long. 
 
Also, one issue is that I run several different jobs at once, all of them backing up to disk.  Would I do the duplicate jobs to disk as well, and then back those jobs off to tape?  I only have a single tape drive (LTO3 400/800).
Ken Putnam's picture
07
May
2007
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Ken Putnam
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You could start each duplicate to tape jobs with a policy as soon as the B2D completes..  They will run until the tape fills up, then the next morning you would swap tapes and let them continue

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Michael Landry's picture
08
May
2007
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Michael Landry

Well, not sure if policy is the way to go.  If I were to create one Duplicate backup sets job, and then select all the catalogs for the date I want to duplicate - that date being the last day of the month - then I think I would achieve the required result...yes?
 
Basically, I ran into an issue earlier when I tried to restore from a monthly archive tape that contained only .BKF files.  When I went to catalog the .BKF files I received an error due to the fact that the .BKF files and their associated media still existed on disk, and within BE database.  I was able to workaround the issue, but need to resolve it now.
 
Thanks.
 
 
Ken Putnam's picture
09
May
2007
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Ken Putnam
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Yes, if you don't have a scheduled Monthly job, then you would have to create a new duplicate job each month.
 
In the past when you archived the BKF files, how were you removing then from disk? 
 
 

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