Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape Backup

[plexer]

DMcCoy: Have you tested those tapes at all?

 

Ben

[DMcCoy]

DMcCoy: Have you tested those tapes at all?

 

Ben

 

They are tested occasionally and used to restore work. I've not had a dead LTO tape yet, the monthly tapes are used just once. Tapes work fine if you keep them at the right temperatures and replace them each year.

[sidewinder]

I currently do a full backup straight to tape each friday and have a rotation of 6 LTO-3 tapes

Differential backups are done every day to disk

 

It works well but I would like to be able to backup to disk first, just so I could have the last weeks worth there for quick restore without having to trudge all the way to the fire safe (which is kept in another building) every time someone loses a file (which happens quite often)

 

Problem Ive got is that to do proper Disk to disk to tape with Backup Exec, you need at least version 10 I think. Im stuck with 9.1 as we cant afford to upgrade. I did try in the past to just backup the backup files to tape but reimporting them into backup exec was a nightmare when we needed to restore something

[nicholab]

I don't think you need back up exec 10 if you use iSCSI as it appears as a local drive. For this you would need some thing like an HP virtual tape library which can act as an iSCSI target.

[sahmeepee]

Sorry to dredge up a month-old thread, but has anyone looked at Microsoft's Data Protection Manager 2007 for this purpose? I couldn't find any forums hits in the search (can you do phrase searches?!).

 

It's not all that expensive to education (not got exact figures yet, but going off american edu pricing) when compared with some of the commercial offerings from arcserve/veritas etc. and it seems to do near-continuous backups of sql server 2000/2005, exchange 2003/2007, sharepoint... and will do D>D>T backups as well if you want (I don't!). The backup is block-level a la volume shadow copy too, so presumably gives you a similar return in terms of "lifespan of backups vs. space required".

 

Other plus points:

You can also allow people to restore their own data if you are so inclined.

It isn't Computer Associates Arcserve Brightstor Backup 11

Tape encryption

Data deduplication to reduce storage requirements

Bandwidth throttling

 

Downsides:

Needs a Windows server to run on - possibly a dedicated one, but that may be avoidable.

It's not free, as mentioned above.

It can't do its magic with Win2k (lack of volume shadow copy y'see)

For our site it would need to go in a location away from our two server rooms OR AFAICT we'd have to set up 2 server instances

 

 

I'm looking at BackupAssist as well (before anyone jumps down my throat!), but was interested if anyone had any experience/opinions on SCDPM2007..

[zag]

Totally agree about the shadow copy thing replacing daily backups, i've done exactly this and never had a problem. Its a great feature.

 

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/techinfo/overview/scr.mspx

 

We still run a full backup every Saturday and this seems to cover all the bases. I have had to deal with a corrupted raid drive on our main file server before and the backup worked well. People were not too bothered about a few days loss and even then, 5 days loss is worst case scenario if the server fails on a Friday evening.

 

I need to look into off site backups but will probably just get a removable hard disk for my backup server.

 

I also do a 3 month backup to another server that has a couple of hundred gigs spare just in case.