Grommit Posted October 2, 2006 Posted October 2, 2006 Does NT Baxckuo do open files and SQL backups ?
mrforgetful Posted October 2, 2006 Posted October 2, 2006 To restore anything mailbox related in Exchange using ntbackup you need to restore the entire Mailbox store, but this doesn't take long to be honest. Also, if you have Enterprise Exchange (I don't), then obviously you keep all your Staff and year groups in different storage groups for this reason among many. On a more personal note, we use Retrospect 7.5 and I think it's crap. It takes an age to do any restore compared to when I used Veritas. How much are those Superloaders? Are they any use if you need to take the tapes home? Basically our backup is on it's own server, Retrospect does incremental through the night to Hard Disk, then we Recycle it over to tape throught the day to take home for fire safety reasons. The trouble is now it's too big for a 400Gb tape, and I don't really want to use two for each day. How can I get a backup each day to take home without spending half my day swapping tapes etc...?
wesleyw Posted October 2, 2006 Posted October 2, 2006 The incremental is 400gb? I wouldn't have though there would have been that many changes between backups? Wes
mrforgetful Posted October 2, 2006 Posted October 2, 2006 The Proactive is incremental, but the Disk to tape copies everything each time so I only need one tape. I didn't set it up to be honest, outside support contract 'futureproof solution' that's hardly even a year old and cost...a lot I understand.
mrforgetful Posted October 2, 2006 Posted October 2, 2006 That's a good point, I was presuming it was compressed but thinking about it more it might not be. Unfortunately I can't see all the properties of things at the minute as 'Data set is in use', basically my Disk backup is being copied to my tape. Never been happy with any of this set up to be honest, but y'know what it's like, no input just use what I'm given!
wesleyw Posted October 2, 2006 Posted October 2, 2006 If it's compressed and your looking for a superloader then LTO3 would be a good bet 400gb (800gb compressed) per tape. Wes
mrforgetful Posted October 2, 2006 Posted October 2, 2006 It's LTO2, 200Gb / 400Gb Compressed that I'm using at the minute. I found an option for Software compression that's turned off but I'm sure the drive supports it in hardware. How much am I looking at for what you suggested Wes?
wesleyw Posted October 2, 2006 Posted October 2, 2006 You should be able to squeeze more onto the tape hopefully probably 300gb if you're lucky. The loaders are very useful especially if you have a overspec'ced backup procedure like the one I wrote out lol. Every night a backup for 5 days (a week ) two weeks worth of tapes then a backup at each half term and full term then one on a six monthly rota means we have a good selection of backups we can go back to! Wes
mrforgetful Posted October 2, 2006 Posted October 2, 2006 Thanks for all your help, what's the price? But what if you have a fire?
wesleyw Posted October 2, 2006 Posted October 2, 2006 You always take the newest tape offsite and store the one before it if possible in a fire proof safe. As for the price it depends on the amount of slots 1500 - 3000 usually worth it though especially if you have a good software backup solution. Wes
pinemarten Posted October 2, 2006 Posted October 2, 2006 "But what if you have a fire?" run like f*ck... no only joking you should always keep a copy of the tape at home and rotate them weekly!
Grommit Posted October 3, 2006 Posted October 3, 2006 Can NTbackup do SQL Servers and Open Files ? and if I do a server to to disk back up what would the command line be if I wanted the files to be written over weekly in NTbackup ?
ajbritton Posted October 3, 2006 Posted October 3, 2006 NTBackup cannot backup 'live' SQL servers, but if you are going to script everything then you could either stop the SQL server prior to backup and start it again afterwards or better still, you could run a TSQL script to backup the databases. AFAIK, NTBackup can only backup open files in conjuction with ShadowCopies.
broc Posted October 3, 2006 Posted October 3, 2006 Can NTbackup do SQL Servers and Open Files ? and if I do a server to to disk back up what would the command line be if I wanted the files to be written over weekly in NTbackup ? I found the easiest way to get started was to use the NTBACKUP wizard. It will generate the backup command for you. Click on the advanced button to get more options (compression, verify, replace files etc) and set the schedule for running the backups. If you search in Windows Help & support for NTBACKUP you will find the syntax and there are also some command line examples to look at.
Dos_Box Posted October 3, 2006 Posted October 3, 2006 The problem with NTBackup is that it is pants. It will forget to do schedueled backups. Lose media from its' backup sets, and generally not do what it is supposeds to. I use Dantz (EMC) Retrospect 7.5, as it is simple, quick and its proactive backup system means that it will backup many jobs over a period of time rater than trying to do them all at once. SImply configure your jobs, make them proactive, and the system will do them as and when it can.
broc Posted October 3, 2006 Posted October 3, 2006 It will forget to do schedueled backups. Lose media from its' backup sets. Interesting... Over the last 2 years I have not had any problems with NTBACKUP doing simple volume backups to files located on a remote server HDD. We backup around 250gb each night with NTBACKUP & it runs like clockwork on Server 2003. Our daily SIMS server backup to AIT tape was set up by the LEA MIS team to use NTBACKUP too & that has never failed (apart from when the tape drive decided to give up).
mrforgetful Posted October 3, 2006 Posted October 3, 2006 I find Retrospect to be the worst Backup software to do a restore with that I have ever used, it takes forever as it checks everything so many times and it's unnecessary. It checks through everything it has in that snapshot before you can look through it. You choose what you want and it rechecks it has it. It will then check to see where it can restore to, then you find where to put it and it rechecks it again, before taking a split second to restore the file. Avantis was quick, open it, browse through the tree ala Windows Explorer, click restore. Simple.
plexer Posted October 3, 2006 Posted October 3, 2006 The problem with NTBackup is that it is pants. It will forget to do schedueled backups. Lose media from its' backup sets. Not when coupled with backupassist it won't Now if I got a quid for everytime I mentioned it I'd have about a tenner by now Ben
ajbritton Posted October 3, 2006 Posted October 3, 2006 The problem with NTBackup is that it is pants. It will forget to do schedueled backups. Lose media from its' backup sets, and generally not do what it is supposeds to. I use Dantz (EMC) Retrospect 7.5, as it is simple, quick and its proactive backup system means that it will backup many jobs over a period of time rater than trying to do them all at once. SImply configure your jobs, make them proactive, and the system will do them as and when it can. Interesting. We use NTBackup on upwards of 100 servers and although I could not say we never experience problems with backup, I can't remember a single one which was down to a problem with NTBackup itself. Retrospect seems to say that it works by using incremental backups all the time (progressive). Does this mean that you never get another full backup? This would worry me greatly. What if the tape with the first backup fails? I've looked at the user guide on the website and it looks scarily complicated!! Proactive backup does look clever, if it can't finish the backup in one go (during it's scheduled period of activity), it will carry on next time, but I suspect it's only really needed in complex setups with many servers. I like the simplicity of NTBackup. It backs up files. It restores files. You can script it. It doesn't try to do lots of magic behind the scenes which, should it go wrong, leaves you covered in poo. The last thing you want when your server dies is to have to spend another day reading the manual, only to discover you forget to tick the box that says 'I might want to restore my data one day'! I suspect most schools based techs don't have the time to perform regular disaster recovery test runs.
Dos_Box Posted October 3, 2006 Posted October 3, 2006 I have a tape array (Tandberg LTO2 Autoloader) and have a set jub for my weekly off site tapes, but the rest, mail, user areas and databases simply increment. My weekly is a full backup of everything on the incrementals.
Joedetic Posted October 3, 2006 Posted October 3, 2006 Veritas Backup exec is what my school used (before i left and went to uni...not that they used it and stopped....you get the idea ) I always found that to be a nice userfriendly piece of software that did as it was told and made restoring and backing up files a relatively easy task in comparison to something like NT Backup. I've used NT backup in the past and found it unstable if i try to perform a full system restore. The other thing was it didnt seem to restore the correct permissions. I had a backup of an old SIMS SQL 200 server and i restored some files to a folder as a backup-restore-test...it turns out that i then couldnt delete that folder once done...even as admin :S
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