How to force cloning to completely fill tape volume?

[goony]

In my backup setup I have a tape jukebox has two LTO2 tape drives.

Overnight, about 7 different backup groups run and backup savesets are stored on disk, and they backup groups also do an automatic cloning to tape to be taken offsite the next day.

The next morning, 3 tapes from the clone pool have been used: First tape is FULL, second tape is 26% used and 3rd tape is 6% used.

How can I ensure that the 2nd tape fills up completely before using a 3rd tape? I'm trying to avoid sending too many partially filled tapes offsite.

EMC support suggests editing the pool charactaristics to specify a single physical tape drive, thus only one tape can clone at a time, but in the event of the failure of that tape drive the cloning would not be performed at all.

Any other ideas?

Thanks!

 

[ag100]

Hey - You can script the clone operation to allow only one job at a time...

For example:

Get the save sets from your backup window (that haven't been cloned yet) and dump them to a file...

mminfo -q "savetime > 12 hours ago,copies=1" -r "ssid" > /tmp/ssid_list

(if you're using adv_file type devices, copies will probably have to be set to 2)

Then, with a scheduler, fire off the nsrclone command using parameters to read the SSID file.

nsrclone -b <clone pool> -S -f /tmp/ssid_list

It may take a little testing to get things exactly how you want them, but it shouldn't be too bad. When building the script, be sure to include code for error handling, restarting of script, etc...

Good luck!

-ag100