Backup to Disk and then to Tape

I do not have Advanced Disk based backup option, does this provide such a feature?

No it does not

What most folks who do B2D2T do is use a policy to do the Duplicate to Tape as soon as the backup to disk is finished.  This along with a proper OPP for your disk media sets shoiuld prevent you from needing to manually recover disk space

How large is your B2D volume and about how much do you backup on a FULL?  On DIFF/INCR?

How long do you need/want to keep data on disk?

Have you considered D2D2D?  That is backup to disk and duplicate to eSATA (or USB3) external drives?  This would cut way down on your Duplication time, for one thing

 

 

I have 2 TB of disk space to backup to backup most servers.  I have a separate 1TB for our Exchange (the separation made the Exchange backups more reliable).  I don't have the deduplication function either.  The guy who originally configured this server, setup the Jobs where multiple servers are in a single Backup Selection List, then there are Backup Policies for Virtual Servers.  In troubleshooting this server, I keep breaking down the Selection lists to have less servers in each list.  In the older installation of Backup Exec 12.5, I had each server with it's own selection list, and used the policy to backup the servers.  I am starting to wonder if it is better to have a selection list for each server, although it creates lots of jobs. 

I did change the Backup to Disk policy to not append (although Append was a short timeframe).

I am filling up two LTO4 tapes and halfway filling the third LTO4 tape in a weekly full backup.  Roughly 3TB of backed up data from what I can discern.  I am not as worried about the incrementals, but I would like to be able to have a full backup with the current weeks worth of incrementals if I could hold it.

I am OK with keeping the data on disk for a week, but I also have issues with the Backup to Disk being erased before I can even get the incrementals to tape, I don't always get the Incrementals written to tape at times.

 

I may not be able to keep all the servers on the B2D, but if I could still use it to shorten the backup cycles, that would acheive the main objective.  Being able to keep the backups to disk for a week would be gravy :).

Later,

Ray

From what I can see you don't have sufficient disk space to even keep one copy of all your backups on disk.  You only have 3TB of disk space and you have 3TB of backup data.  The idea of backing up to disk is to have at least one copy of backup for easy access.

If you want to have the benefit of having a backup on disk for easy access, then you have to increase your disk storage.  Otherwise, forget about your disk backup and just backup directly to tape.  It is very difficult to try to do what you are trying to do.  That is, delete the disk backup as soon as they are duplicated to tape.  Anyway, as I said before, even if you are able to do this, this defeats the purpose of backing up to disk.

The purpose is that backing up to disk first then copying to tape still reduces the backup Window significantly, and from what I understand reduces the wear on the tape drive.  I agree that having limited backup space to disk is frustrating.  I actually don't have all jobs going to disk first and I have had to remove some servers from backing up to disk to keep this functionality working.  But even when I don't backup too much to this space, it seems to me that backing up a group of servers, then copying from disk to tape is still beneficial.

These tips are helpful even if I have to deal with the limited disk space.