D2D2T Backup - Backup Exec 12

[gshaw]

Recently we had a bit of aggro with our Sony SAIT 1TB tape drive deciding to take it's xmas break a few days early and as such didn't have any backups for a bit (bought a 1TB USB2 HD now just in case it happens again).

This made me think about trying to get D2D2T backups going so I've got double protection (plus easier restores )

System would be...

HP DL380 G4 > StoreVault S500 (either iSCSI LUN or file share, not sure which is better for this) > Sony tape drive

Has anyone got this working on Backup Exec 11 or 12? Just wondering how much it increases backup job times by (if at all) and whether you've had any problems with it?

We'd need to overwrite the disk backup daily as it's 375GB a time, job is a full backup ran daily at 11pm...

[Zimmer]

Try to go down the iSCSI route if possible

Will you be using anything like RoboCopy to move the data to the disk backup location?

[Diello]

Yes - BackupExec works for D2D2T solutions. We have it here with a NAS & PowerVault autoloader.

Basically you use the Policies facility in BackupExec to first copy the data from the servers to be backed up to the NAS server by using a Backup-to-Disk folder.

You then set that backup to be duplicated onto the tape when the B2D has completed. Using the proper "Duplicate" system, it means when you have to do a restore, it will restore to the original server, so you don't have to restore from Tape to NAS to Server.

We also overwrite the daily NAS backup, just set the job to overwrite the B2D folder instead of append it.

Our D2D backups are done in about 10 hours, kick off at 7PM, so are done for the day, the tapes finish about 1PM, but since it's just doing NAS---> SCSI AutoLoader, it has no impact on the network.

The other big bonus we've found with this is that any restores you have to do from the previous day, is still on the NAS, so you can do the restore from there, meaning restore times are literally seconds. Useful when the majority of restores are "I've just pressed DELETE and ENTER instead of just ENTER"!

[gshaw]

Thanks for the info

Think the problem we would have is that our tape drive is a fiber channel HBA jobbie (so few in the UK even Sony didn't know about it!) so I think would have to run from our NAS box (read that as main file server).

The StoreVault we'd be running the disk backup to can handle SCSI tape drives through its management software but I think picking up the fiber one would be beyond it so both backups would have to run through the main file server. Might cause a problem with backup times, not sure if it would finish quickly enough... does your D2D run faster than D2T?

[torledo]

does your D2D run faster than D2T?

I for one would be very surprised if it did.

[gshaw]

Coming back to this again with a new tape drive now the Sony one decided to destroy it's comms link with the outside world

The other idea I've come up with would be to shunt the backup job \ Backup Exec to a server I use for IT management (our internal WSS3 site, SMS, WSUS etc) then do the D2D2T from there. So basically...

Full nightly backup
------------------

iSCSI box <<< management server >>> tape drive

So hopefully the backup job can then run for as long as it wants into the morning without affecting performance of the NAS server with all our file shares on.

Other option is the full backup to tape every day and just do the disk backup once as week as an added extra.