Chapter 7: Planning For Media Rotation; Media Rotation Concepts - HP BB118BV - StorageWorks Data Protector Express Package User Manual

Data Protector Express offers flexible media rotation features. The primary purpose for media rotation is
to maximize your data security and to provide an easy means to recover your data in the event of data
loss. Media rotation also protects you from data loss due to overuse of the backup media. For ease of use
and maximum security, you can use the default media schedules with the default media rotations found in
Data Protector Express. Or, alternatively, you can exclude media scheduling, and its associated rotations,
from your backup jobs and manage your media manually.
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Media Sets
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Which Rotation Type to Select
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Adding Media Rotation to a Backup Job
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Modifying Rotation Types
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Managing Backups with or Without Media Rotation
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Media Rotation Concepts

Backup jobs performed for disaster protection are often run daily. Ensuring that you have all the files you
need to restore your system often involves creating and maintaining one or more sets of media (such as
tape cartridges) for use during a recovery. Rather than use new media each time a backup job is run, Data
Protector Express recycles or reuses media. This is efficient because it keeps costs down by limiting the
amount of media needed and still provides for data security, should any media fail or be otherwise
unavailable.
The process of recycling or reusing media is referred to as media rotation. Data Protector Express rotates
media by creating media sets named to correspond to a job's scheduled backup intervals, and reuses
media using a fixed number of sets. The media set names can be based either on the scheduled interval or
on the type of fixed rotation.
When two intervals in a schedule are scheduled to run at the same time, they have the following
precedence: Year, Month, Week, Day, Hour, Minute. For example, if a job was scheduled to run every
hour using the Hour interval, and once every day using the Day interval—then once each day the daily
backup would take precedence over the hourly backup.