Hi Colin,
Thankyou for a speedy reply....
So will this scenario work as per your explanation above?
One off Full Backup Job - overwrite protection until 31/12/2099
Create a new Job for the incremental changes each night but set that job to also Overwrite, not append?
The data is all a mixture of word, pdf and xml files only. Nothing else bar these 3 file formats.
Just to confirm the full backup will only be ever run once and then its just the appended data backed up each day until the job becomes redunadant somewhere down the line.
Thankyou
Hmm not a good idea - in fact very bad
If you try for an incremental forverer strategy and one of more of the backup sets is lost or gets corrupted, any complete disaster will be very limited limited (and complicated) depending on which parts of the chain were lost - with the worse case scenario of being impossible to recover the system at all. You should be running regular full backups and have enough storage to be able to at least maintain a GFS strategy against a full backup.
Also if you try for an incremental forever strategy and have all your backup sets but (as an example) it is 300 days of backups and then you need to recover from a server disaster, your restore to the state at the time of the most recent incremental could take days to achieve as the backup admin would have to create 300 restore jobs (more or less one at a time)
You could possibly look at synthetic backups - but as BE 2010 R3 is no longer supported, if you don't already own the correct licenses for this option then you can't use it and even if you have the correct licenses this still need enough storage for at leats 2 full backups and a weeks worth of incrementals
Not sure what to do here then...
The full backup took 2 days to complete - there are over 1 million files - and it backs up to a NAS over a gigabit network.
So this kind of rules out doing full regular backups as the data will just never be up to date?
I have 8 jobs in total that i need to run - 3 of them in the above format of far too much data for fulls consistently and the other 5 are a Full backup every Sunday and then incrementals every other day until the next Sunday when the full overwrites - rinse and repeat.
The version of 2010 in use is a NFRS licence and i believe we have licences granted for every agent possible.
Any suggestions Colin?
Thanks
I guess if you are not interested in DR of the complete server and only looking at documents then the issue of losing part of the chain (unless you lose the initial full) is less critical although the scenario for 300 days if you lost the volume containing the documents would still apply (with or without a missing set in the chain)
Traditionally backup products that do file level backup operations (such as Backup Exec) do experience performance issues if a very large number of smaller files are involved - the solution to this is usually look at Image/Block level products (such as Veritas System Recovery) instead (or possibly virtualize the server containing the data and then Backup Exec does do image level backup of VMs)
Mind you writing data to a backup device over CIFS is also a performance limiter due to the protocol being used, backup to locally connected (or SAN connected) disks could also potentially be quicker - although I could not guarantee how much quicker and the only way to find out is for you to invest in such storage.
I take System images using a different product for DR of the OS partition and server restore to same or bare metal servers, to external hard drives that are rotated and taken offsite.
Backup exec takes care of the data only, that is generally on seperate raid arrays in the remote server(s) away from the OS partition - because all of this data has to go to an offsite remote location
So in terms of BE i literally just need to be able to backup at file level.
If i had say a 300 day incremental on top of the original full and i needed to restore all the data on the 301st day - 1 restore job by resource wouldnt restore all the data from all 299 incrementals and the full automatically working through the backup chain?
