Forum Discussion

dpsmith's avatar
dpsmith
Level 3
15 years ago

backup to disk and then to tape best practice

Hello.

Currently I have 20 backup to disk jobs running over a 12 hour period.

That part is fine, works great. Having 8 jobs running to disk at once instead of one job at a time to tape is a dream come true.

I then backup to tape using a "working set changed today" and only keep a 2 day retention on the disk.

Those tapes are taken offsite for DR.

 

My understanding is that if I needed to restore data from 2 weeks ago I'd retrieve the tape I needed,  I would restore that backup to tape job and then I would have the 20 backups that took place that day to restore from.

 

But what happens if I lose my backupexec server and have to restore everything from scratch? Will I be able to restore like I have planned? Is that even the best way to do it at all?

 

I've been searching. If someone could even give me a link i'd appriciate it.

 

 

 

2010
Backing Up
Backup and Recovery
Backup Exec
Best Practice
Restore

3 Replies

  • AmolB's avatar
    AmolB
    Moderator
    15 years ago

    Without catalogs you cannot restore any data. If the server goes down you will loose the catalogs too.

    So before restoring any data you will have to recatalog the tapes.

  • Kiran_Bandi's avatar
    Kiran_Bandi
    Level 6
    15 years ago

    To retrieve data from a tape media Incase of a BE media server crash, you have to install BE on the new server, attach & configure a tape device to it, Keep the media from which you want to recover the data, inventory it, catalog it and restore data.

    Cataloging process may take long time depending on the size of data media have. (If you have more number of media to restore from, then it will be a nightmare) To prevent from this, you can keep a copy of DATA & CATALOGS folders on a machine other than BE media server or on a temporary storage device. DATA & CATALOGS folders exist in BE installation directory.

    If you have those two folders, you can use them with a fresh installation of BE and can get old configurtion and Catalogs back.

    Regards....

  • DominikG's avatar
    DominikG
    Level 6
    15 years ago

    Some addition:

    1. Database maintenance (Tools -> options -> database maintenance)

    this saves a dump of the backup Exec database to .../Backup Exec/Data/ folder named "BEDB.bak" - You should copy this file to a network location on a regular basis for easy restore in case of disaster. If you back it up with BE, you would have to know on which tape it resides and you would habe to catalog it first. (not comfortable)

    2. Catalog folder (default C:/Program Files/Symantec/Backup Exec/catalogs)

    Do the same like stated above

    If you keep this data on a network share, always updated, lets say by a windows task, which is copying it daily to it, you can re-install BE with same name on the machine, put these files back to their original location and do a restore of the BEDB.bak with beutility.exe and your whole system is up and running again.

    3. In addition

    Please make sure you have the media-based catalogs enabled under Tools -> options -> catalog. This option stores the catalogs for each media on the media itself, leading to a faster cataloging prosess in case you would have to do it beacause you lost the catalogs and your backup of it.

     

    best regards

    Dominik