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Daleta_Whiskey's avatar
Daleta_Whiskey
Level 3
11 years ago

BEWS v15 - How do I...?

I'll try to keep this short and add more details as requested.

We're migrating from a long line of use of BackupExec from V8 to 2010R3 to V15 here in the next few months. The configuration we have is not a standard File server enviroment, even though on the surface it's just a giant file server.

Our need is we have a clustered system hosting out anywhere from 10-200TB of raid space. This space is broken down into 10-20 raid volumes of equal size. Unlike normal file servers there are other processes in place that control the adding of removing of files and on the back end there is a seperate archive unit that basically maintains a copy of all the files. So in our enviroment, Backups are just backups to the backup. Giving the amount of data we handle, performing regular full backups is not realistic and not even necassary.

In previous version of Backup Exec, we may have locations that never ran a full backup. But they do run daily incremental backups. Starting with 2012 and continued on with V15, it seems Symantec is mandating at leat one full backup, which we're fine with. But it seems the process of creating jobs without a full backup attached isn't an option. This is very strange.

So my quesiton, is it possible that we can create a backup job that is strictly an incremental without a full backup attached? Sure we can disbale one from running, but to keep from an accidental run, we'd prefer it just wasn't attached to the job at all.

When we do run a full Backup, we use the job settings of "Copy the files" and not the standard reset the archive bit. It seems all the default full backups don't allow this to be changed. And so I have to create a seperate full backup inside the job that already has a full backup so that I can choose the option to only "copy the files"

Am I missing the obvious here? Is there a "I know what I want" switch that I can turn on that gets V15 to act like the prevoious versions of BEWS. Right now it seems V15 is trying to force me to do the standard "office automation" backup even though that model doesn't work for our enviroment at all.

Thanks for any suggests

Backing Up
Backup and Recovery
Backup Exec
Configuring
Features
Windows Server (2003-2008)

4 Replies

  • pkh's avatar
    pkh
    Moderator
    11 years ago

    Your observances are correct.

    From BE 2012 onwards, it is not possible to to run an incremental job without running a full backup and there is no way around this.

  • Daleta_Whiskey's avatar
    Daleta_Whiskey
    Level 3
    11 years ago

    Just to be clear, doing the A full backup is fine. But am I stuck with always having that Full as part of the job?

    Currently if we have 15 volumes, we'll run 15 seperate Full backups, Since running a single 200TB backup doesn't make sense. Is the only option to Run a full, wait til it's done and then change the job to run on a differerent volume? I can't believe they would make it that complicated, plus that seems to negate our dual drive system in which we could have 2 full backups or a full and incremental running at the same time.

    Thanks for the reply

    Dale

  • pkh's avatar
    pkh
    Moderator
    11 years ago

    Yes, you are stuck with the full backup, and no, it is not possible to change the selection list of the full backup to "fool" BE.

    Since you are archiving your files, you should be backing up the archive, rather than the files themselves.

  • Daleta_Whiskey's avatar
    Daleta_Whiskey
    Level 3
    11 years ago

    Well, the archive is being backed up(actually replicated to other locations).  The only reason Backups were done up until recently, is in the advent that the archive (which was optical disc) based, lost a platter, that platter's worth of data would be restored (thus why fulls are not really needed). Now that Archive is a replicated spinning disk solution, the need for backups goes way way down. There is also issues with the cost of tapes to maintain a rotation of tapes for fulls

    Seems really odd that Symantec\BEWS would take away abilities we've had for the past 15+ years and force a one size fits all model. But maybe we'll just have sites do their fulls every quarter and call it a day.

    Thanks again for the replies.