I have an issue I'm attempting to resolve with my end of month backups.
All my copies are full every night (synthetic) so every day we have a full backup. However, Month end backups remain problematic for me, the reason is currently we use a selective aux copy that does a tape to tape copy for the last backup of the month. So it picks from the unit internally a selection of all the last backups, moves these to another tape, which we then export.
The reason it's done this way is that we previously had it setup like this before extended retention came to be. The annoyance with this comes from the problem created by retired servers, if I retire a server in the middle of the month, the selective policy wants a tape that contains the last job for this server, which is ALWAYS at our storage location. So I either have to manually prune this one job, or call the tape back and delay my selective copy job.
I've been looking at doing away with the selective copy entirely and just using extended retention on my synchronous tape copy, however, if I do this I will still have the same problem, because the middle of the month retired server will suddenly be marked as the last backup of the month. So I will have my tapes from the last of the month as well as a job on a tape in the middle of the month that all of a sudden cannot be pruned.
How do you guys deal with this issue?
