ful56_uk Posted July 1, 2009 Posted July 1, 2009 hi i have just finished setting up our new autoloader. its a 8 tape lto 4 hp autoloader. i have backup exec 12.5, i am just woundering what people would suggesting using in a back policy. i got 20 tapes for the system. any advice?
Michael Posted July 1, 2009 Posted July 1, 2009 20 tapes gives you 4 weeks or a month worth of backups (Mon-Fri). You could do a full backup every evening, or you could do a full backup on Monday and differential/incremental backups the remaining of the week. It all depends just how much data you have to backup mainly. Anything less than 80GB can usually be backed up fully every evening. 1
DMcCoy Posted July 1, 2009 Posted July 1, 2009 (edited) 20 tapes gives you 4 weeks or a month worth of backups (Mon-Fri). You could do a full backup every evening, or you could do a full backup on Monday and differential/incremental backups the remaining of the week. It all depends just how much data you have to backup mainly. Anything less than 80GB can usually be backed up fully every evening. It gets you a year with a sensible rotation schedule. four weeks is no way near enough. Mon - Thurs Friday 1 - Friday 4 Month 1 - Month 12. Edited July 1, 2009 by DMcCoy 1
Michael Posted July 1, 2009 Posted July 1, 2009 A year, how would that work? The example I gave would give a month worth of backup.
DMcCoy Posted July 1, 2009 Posted July 1, 2009 A year, how would that work? The example I gave would give a month worth of backup. You have a weeks worth of daily backups, 4 weekly tapes and 12 monthly tapes. So you can go back to a point in time a within the week, any friday in the last month and any month in the last year. I replace tapes each year so I have all the month tapes from the last year. This use will place quite a lot of wear on the daily tapes (50 uses a year, which is why they must be replaced each year although I've never had any lto tapes fail with that sort of use). I export the weekly tapes and store them offsite, monthly stay in the autoloader for the year and then go offsite. All tapes created in the last 6 months since we changed to lto4 are encrypted. Currently running a full backup of 730GB each night, second auto loader going to be put into use over the summer as we got them when they were a bargain price on Dells site. 1
Michael Posted July 1, 2009 Posted July 1, 2009 Sounds like you've really thought it through I see no reason why that wouldn't work, but I've never been asked to provide upto a year worth of backup. 730GB is a lot to backup. Wouldn't adding a NAS to the equation speed things up, but also be a lot more cost effective?
DMcCoy Posted July 1, 2009 Posted July 1, 2009 Sounds like you've really thought it through I see no reason why that wouldn't work, but I've never been asked to provide upto a year worth of backup. 730GB is a lot to backup. Wouldn't adding a NAS to the equation speed things up, but also be a lot more cost effective? It's actually one of the most common forms of backup rotation (GFS), usually refered to in the backup software manuals - backup exec has it as a predefined scheme iirc. Grandfather-father-son backup - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The slowest part of my backup is the D2D (2T is much quicker) which is already to a 2GB fibre connected 7 disk RAID 0 array on an xraid box. It should speed up once the new servers are in. I'm only doing D2D because my old P4 Xeons can't keep up with the lto4 drive, dropping below the magic 1/3 of the bandwidth causing a start/stop of the tape instead of the prefered slow down of writing (one of the nice things about lto). This "shoe shining" effect of the tape going backwards and forwards can affect wear on the drive so I simply decided to thow the unused xraid into the gap with an old server with a new SAS card. 1
DMcCoy Posted July 1, 2009 Posted July 1, 2009 hi i have just finished setting up our new autoloader. its a 8 tape lto 4 hp autoloader. i have backup exec 12.5, i am just woundering what people would suggesting using in a back policy. i got 20 tapes for the system. any advice? As I mentioned in the other replies you will probably want a variant of gfs for backup exec. You can use the media groups and overwrite policy to get what you want. 4 daily tapes - Keep for 5 days 4 Weekly tapes - Keep for 3 weeks 12 Monthly tapes - No overwrite (move one to scratch tapes once a month in time for the backup) It should then automatically use the tape available for overwriting, you will have to manually rotate round some tapes with an 8 slot loader though. I suggest you use the hardware encryption offered by the lto4 drive with backup exec 12.5, just make sure a copy of the key is secure at an offsite location too. If you can manage it a full backup each days is always best - you can get the lto4 going at 100GB+ an hour if all is working well.
Michael Posted July 1, 2009 Posted July 1, 2009 I do know of the Grandfather-father-son backup schedule, but never really studied it or other available techniques. [ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup_rotation_scheme]techniques[/ame].
DMcCoy Posted July 1, 2009 Posted July 1, 2009 I do know of the Grandfather-father-son backup schedule, but never really studied it or other available techniques. techniques. It's worth using, especially with backup exec as you can set it all up with the policies 1
ful56_uk Posted July 2, 2009 Author Posted July 2, 2009 thanks guys ill have a little play, domain dont go live till september so it give me time to look at the sizes of the backup and what i am backing up
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