veritas back up - Back up Tapes

[sharkster]

hello,
just a quick question,
the back up tapes i am using are imation 40/80GB tapes and they are full now so its not getting backed up, now i know i can change the compression ratio to 2/1 but if i do this will is their more chance of some of the data being corrupt (or ever go wrong) if i ever need to do a restore?
thank you

[Heebeejeebee]

Compression shouldn't make the backup less reliable. It may take longer to do though.

Personally I would ditch the DAT40 (?) drive you currently have and go to a much larger capacity drive perhaps LTO3 or 4. This will give you 800/1600MB (compressed).

I have a bunch of DAT72 drives sitting around doing nothing since we've moved over to LTOs and especially since we now have an autoloader.

HBJB

[sharkster]

i have a Benchmark DLT1/VS80 tape drive,
and the tapes we use are imation DLTtape 4 40/80GB,
so should i just change the tape or the drive do you mean?

[Heebeejeebee]

Originally Posted by sharkster

i have a Benchmark DLT1/VS80 tape drive,
and the tapes we use are imation DLTtape 4 40/80GB,
so should i just change the tape or the drive do you mean?

Drive - ASAP

HBJB

[sharkster]

is it because its old or just a small drive?
we only have around 45-50GB needing to be backed up at the mo but it will be around 80GB by summer

[Heebeejeebee]

I'd try to future proof yourself as much as you can. You say you will have a need to backup 80gig by the summer but what about the summer after that? 100? 120?

If you get a newer, much faster drive now you may just avoid having to panic about it later. Of course, depending on your current setup you may need to update your SCSI card as well .

HBJB

[Polski]

...and in the mean time, set your backup to do one part of the data on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and the other half on Tuesday and Thursday.

I assume you have got rid of all the junk files that you can?

[sharkster]

yeh and resized all the pictures
don't think ill be getting a new drive just new tapes. BSF is due to take over in 2 year so it can wait till then. its all backed up to a Hard drive also, as extreme measure.
thanks for all ya help

[maniac]

Our nightly backup is nearing 700GB now, that's a full backup of all staff and student home areas and shared drives, plus all system states and other critical files. We use hardware compression on our tape drive, which is a Quantum 8 tape LTO3 changer, which enables us to get about 550-600GB on a tape (Nativa capacity is 400GB on LTO3) we now use 2 tapes per night.
Veritas should tell you if you're getting data errors, and you should be able to set your reporting to e-mail you if it does detect errors as well, which should help ensure any backup taken is going to be restorable.

We're going to move to incremental backups with a full one on a friday, or some sort of disk backup system soon I think as data is growing at about 1GB a day on average.

Mike.

[limbo]

Originally Posted by maniac

We're going to move to incremental backups with a full one on a friday, or some sort of disk backup system soon I think as data is growing at about 1GB a day on average.

Take a look at differential backups, as opposed to incremental backups.

Rather than just backing up what is new today, this backs up everything that is new since the last full backup.

This means that to restore a file you just need the most recent differential tape and the last full backup tape rather than having to go through a weeks worth of tapes to see which day it got put to tape.

[maniac]

You just cleared up that for me, always wondered what the difference between incremental and differential backups was. Thanks for that!

Mike