Customizing Jobs › Rotation Schemes › How You Can Manage GFS Rotation Jobs on File System Devices

How You Can Manage GFS Rotation Jobs on File System Devices

Arcserve Backup supports using a GFS rotation scheme on File System Devices. A retention period for the media being used in the GFS rotation scheme can be determined using the following default retention cycle for a seven-day weekly rotation:

To run a rotation job beyond a year, a GFS rotation scheme requires 23 File System Devices to be created. These settings can be modified to meet your specific needs. Modifying the default values of the GFS rotation may change the number of FSDs required.

Note: Previously, only local disks were considered FSDs. You can now create FSDs that are accessible through a network share using a Universal Naming Convention (UNC) path.

Because a GFS rotation job may be using local disk drives and drive arrays, users must first make sure that there is enough space on the particular file system to store all the data being backed up for the entire retention period. Creating file system devices on a boot partition is not recommended because a boot disk that becomes full can cause the operating system to function abnormally.

Note: All file system devices need to be assigned to the same device group.

A configured GFS rotation job can run on a daily basis at a specified time. Arcserve Backup utilizes file system devices similar to a physical tape. As needed on a daily basis, Arcserve Backup moves tapes between the save sets and the scratch sets in the media pools, formats blank media, overwrites expired media, and tracks all operations in the database.

You can choose to duplicate backup data stored on the file system devices to physical tape media. The Job Scheduler Wizard and the Tapecopy utility provide the ability to automate the creation of the duplicate images.

The following sections describe the tabs available to customize your rotation job.