Incremental Backups logic seems to be wrong

Hi @takayuki.kado  Tape media sometimes uses hardware compression if enabled it can result in discrepancies in the reported sizes. A 10% incremental backup being displayed as 100% usage could be due to hardware compression or block allocation not reflecting the actual data content.

please verify if your tapes have hardware compression enabled.

I agree to @waqasali and would like to add:

I saw weird things with LTO-6 and LTO-7 tapes in the past when it came to compression or no compression.

Maybe you can share the info which kind of tape you are using.

Thanks @lukas.k for your feedback on this.

Hi @lukas.k we are using Spectra tape library only for archiving purpose here are the details sheet.

Thanks! Tbh I have no experience with Spectra :-( It seems quite interesting that this approach is using SOBR instead of a “classic” tape approach…

Anyways, @takayuki.kado do the answers above help or do you need further assistance? Would be nice to get some more input in case you need more answers. Maybe screenshots could help.

Hi @lukas.k 

As per my understanding using SOBR in VBR can enhance backup scalability, flexibility and efficiency.

Even the feature in SOBR rebalanced your SOBR which is very helpful to divide the backup files on each backup repository under SOBR.

That is absolutely correct @waqasali!

I just never used tapes in a context of a SOBR, my customers are using the “classic” tape jobs and do not combine block or object storages with tapes within a SOBR because they use tapes as dedicated and standalone media which I basically support.

My goal is to move away from tape (but I am absolutely fine with a customer using tapes!) because object storages (especially when it comes to cloud tiers) have a lot more flexibility in my opinion, customers do have a lot less “manual workloads” which means rotating tapes, ejecting an maintaining tape environments.

But again: I am standing behind tape scenarios as well. :-)

Hi @lukas.k 

Here's a brief summary of my hands-on experience:

one of my customer required a retention policy that ensures backups are kept for 6 months to meet this requirement I configured primary backup jobs to run successfully on dell storage and these backups are set up for short term retention and for long-term archival purposes I integrated a tape backup solution and the VBR job settings were adjusted to transfer data to tape for secure and extended storage. This combination of primary and archival backups meets my 6 months retention policy while balancing speed and cost efficiency as well.

Hi @waqasali,

That is exactly the approach I always go with, but there is no SOBR configured, is there?