Backups too many disks?

[Pashers]

Hey techies,

I have six servers to backup so am I right in thinking one server - one disk?

The idea I have is:
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday - Diff backups (appending on same disks). 6 disks
Friday - Full backup (store for a month). 6 Disks x (approx) 4

Monthly backups store for 1 year (6x12)

Yearly bacckups store for 2 years (6x2)


So approx. 114 disks?!

Is that too many disks or does that sound appropriate?

Thanks

[FN-GM]

This is the setup we have.

Each server has a tape for each business day. These go upto 4 weeks each set is labeled week 1, week 2 etc and we start at the begging at the end of week 4. At the end of each month there is another tape, the month end one. The month end one are over written the following year.

[broc]

We have a pair of remote DR servers, one handles Mon,Wed,Fri, the other Tue,Thu plus our network management data. One large SATA disk per day takes all our server backups, they are overwritten each week. We do full NTBACKUPs of server drives (approx 465gb) each night.

We also use SecondCopy to capture updates to staff & student data on our main file server at lunchtime and at 3:15pm and copy them to a second local server which can in an emergency become our file server should the main one go down for any length of time. This SecondCopy archive maintains up to 5 'versions' of any data files and is normally used to recover data lost/overwritten by the user.

To keep County MIS support staff happy, we also back up MIS data to tape every night, the tapes are stored in a data firesafe.

At the end of each half term, staff & student data is dumped off to tape and also stored in the firesafe. These tapes are held for approx 2 years. I have never had to access the data on these tapes in the 5 years or so since we started doing this!

[bossman]

@Broc:
hehe! so this is what you have been up to all this time bonny lad doing all the backups

So good to see your still alive and kicking

[Butuz]

Consolidate all your backing up on to one "backup server" using a big tape drive so that you can do a full backup of all 6 servers onto one tape.

I am implementing here a Friday Full backup and Mon - Thurs differentials and 4 months worth of tapes.

Butuz

[Pashers]

Thanks guys,

So this might sound a stupid question, I have SDX4-200C tapes which can hold 200 gig and 500 gig compressed data. Does the Backup Exec 12 compress the data or does the tape compress it (somehow)? Because the servers together come over 200 gig but under 500 gig. Does this mean it'll fit onto one disk?

[plexer]

Depends on the data itself unlikey ever to acheive that compression ratio.

Can be hardware or software compression.

Ben

[broc]

@Broc:
hehe! so this is what you have been up to all this time bonny lad doing all the backups

So good to see your still alive and kicking

Been very busy spending money & lately having another go at debugging wireless laptops that periodically lose their way and can't find the Domain......

The backups (apart from the tape handling) are automated, I have to keep reminding myself to check from time to time that they still work

Most of the time they do, unless someone 'trips' a breaker in Technology that takes out the power to a network cabinet and breaks the link to the 'offsite' server farm (aka a cupboard in another building).