1

Hi all,

We’ve recently changed our backup tape drive and with it have moved to a set of higher capacity tapes.

We’ve still got access to the old drive but before it dies completely I’d like to copy the important backups (year end and month end) off the old tapes on to an external drive so we can access them in the future.

Anyone know of a program that will handle this copy of tape to disk?

Thanks.

1 Spice up
2

What did you use to back up to tape in the first place? In Backup Exec, which is what we use, you can set up a duplicate job. That way you still have all the same backup points that you can catalog and restore from.

3

Does your backup software have a tapecopy feature? I’ve never used ours (it’s a command-prompt only thing) but it has one. If both drives are connected to the same machine you may be able to do that.

4

Hi Plaice,

Depending on the type of drive and tape combination you’re using, you might not have to.

When we moved to LTO4 drives in our main tape library, we started using LTO4 tapes for any new backup protection groups and gradually phased the old LTO3 tapes out as the data on them expired.

It might be worth checking the backward compatibility of your new drive before undertaking a big copy.

5

Thanks for the replies.

Yes we’re using Backup Exec on this server but the backups we’d like to move from tape to disk are old ones that we need to keep “just in case”.

A tape copy feature is what we were looking for but not sure if this is a feature within Backup Exec, we do have access to a server with Acronis running the backup so that might be an option if it has a tape copy feature.

Backward compatibility isn’t an option either, completely different drives/tapes.

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In Backup Exec, go to the job setup tab. In the jobs section, right click the blank row and pick new duplicate backup sets job and go from there. On the job setup tab you can also get to it by clicking file, new, duplicate backup sets job. It’s part of Backup Execs functions.

The drive needs show up in the devices tab of Backup Exec. To add it you just expand out the stroage devices, right click on your backup server, pick new backup to disk folder and point it to the drive you are copying to. This works for local drives, eSata, USB, pretty much anything the server can see as a drive.

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Just trying to get my head around your suggestion Darko.

Will this backup the data we have on the old tapes on duplicate the current backup job?

As, when the new drive was installed the backup job was changed.

Thanks.

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You are creating a new backup job that has nothing to do with any other job. You are creating a duplicate job (duplicate stuff from a to b), with the source being the backup points from the tape and the target going to disk, new tape or whatever you want. If you keep both tape drives connected you can go tape to tape and skip the tape to disk, disk back down to tape all together.