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AllisonW's avatar
AllisonW
Level 4
10 years ago

Offsite backup questions

We now have our BE backups up and running, saving to a dedicated NAS (connected via iSCSI).  This is all working fine.  However, once a month I'd like to duplicate a full backup to an external drive connected via USB.  These drives should rotate.  Every year, the first backup of the year will be pulled out of rotation and not overwritten.

 

A few questions on this:

  1. These backups obviously require BE to restore.  Let's say 5 years down the road, we need to pull something off of one of the old disks.  Maybe we're not running BE anymore, or maybe the product has changed sufficiently it won't restore from these backups.  Are there any recommended ways to deal with this?  I was thinking of including an OVF template export of the BE server on each disk, so worst came to worst we could spin up the VM on an older version of ESXi.  Any better ideas?
  2. I'd want only the one full backup to be on each disk, just to keep things clean. (Since these aren't our primary backup media, we don't need lots of multiple copies and whatnot.)  Should I just have a scheduled task to clean the drive - except for the abovementioned OVF or whatever - when it's physically swapped?  Or something similar?
  3. Will I run into issues with expiries on these backups?  So if I put a disk from 3 months ago in, will it recognize it's old and try to expire the backup set?  Can I set a different expiration period (or none) for the duplicate backup than the main backup has?
  4. Do I need to make these external disks into a storage pool the same way I would if they were my primary backup location?  Or does it matter, since I'm just putting a single standalone copy on and not trying to maintain dependancies or anything?
  5. Any concepts I'm just completely missing about this?  :-)

 

Thank you!

2014
Backing Up
Backup and Recovery
Backup Exec
Best Practice
Managing Backup Devices
Windows Server (2003-2008)
  • CraigV's avatar
    CraigV
    10 years ago

    Hi,

     

    I'll try answer some of them.

    1. Backing up to a normal B2D, Backup Exec uses the *.bkf format which means you should be able to restore with a future version. That said, another option is to keep an older version of BE on hand with a server (physical is preferable, VM should be fine when restoring via B2D) and restore this way.

    2. Not quite sure what you mean here...

    3. If you set the retention times correctly on the media set, then BE will not expire the data on those drives. Even if it does, you'd simply have to Inventory and then Catalog the data to be able to restore it.

    4. 

    5. None that I can think of. Otherwise increase the available space on the NAS to allow for more FULL backups to be kept.

    Thanks!

  • VJware's avatar
    VJware
    10 years ago

    Consider setting up "Duplicate" backups to the external disks. And yes, different retention periods can be set for the Duplicate vs the Original. While setting up the Duplicate, you can also choose to have the backup copy over only the latest full backup to the extneral disks.

  • pkh's avatar
    pkh
    10 years ago

    You can automate the backup to your USB disks by adding a duplicate stage to the job that you want to save.  If this duplicate stage targets a device pool then you don't have to modify this stage every time you use a new disk.  For each new disk, you just need to define a disk storage on it and add it to the device pool and the duplicate stage will be able to use it.

    To precisely address your concern about pluggin in old disks and having their contents wiped out, by default, if a disk storage is offline for more than 2 weeks, it will automatically be marked as read-only, thus protecting any contents from being wiped out.

  • CraigV's avatar
    CraigV
    10 years ago

    2. If you duplicate the data it would only duplicate the latest backup.

    3. ...when you duplicate, you should be able to specify a different media set. This media set would be set to not append/overwrite, or just set the OPP to 10 years. bear in mind that when doing this, software upgrades are going to have happend multiple times...

    5. Understood!

    Thanks!

     

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  • CraigV's avatar
    CraigV
    Moderator
    10 years ago

    Hi,

     

    I'll try answer some of them.

    1. Backing up to a normal B2D, Backup Exec uses the *.bkf format which means you should be able to restore with a future version. That said, another option is to keep an older version of BE on hand with a server (physical is preferable, VM should be fine when restoring via B2D) and restore this way.

    2. Not quite sure what you mean here...

    3. If you set the retention times correctly on the media set, then BE will not expire the data on those drives. Even if it does, you'd simply have to Inventory and then Catalog the data to be able to restore it.

    4. 

    5. None that I can think of. Otherwise increase the available space on the NAS to allow for more FULL backups to be kept.

    Thanks!

  • AllisonW's avatar
    AllisonW
    Level 4
    10 years ago

    Re: #2 - I just want to make sure only the newest backup is going on these rotating external disks, for clarity's sake.  Just curious if there's a way that's generally automated.

    #3 - What would constitute setting the retention times correctly?  If I want to be able to go back to these many years from now, would "correctly" be setting it to never expire, or in 10 years or something?  And if so, that's the not the expiry I want on the regular backups.  My understanding is that the best way to do these extra backups to external disk is to do a duplicate backup, but can I set differen expiry dates for the duplicate vs the original?

    #5 - It's not a matter of space, it's a matter of taking these external disks offsite.  So even if I had petabytes on the NAS I'd still want to do this.

    Thanks!

  • VJware's avatar
    VJware
    Level 6
    10 years ago

    Consider setting up "Duplicate" backups to the external disks. And yes, different retention periods can be set for the Duplicate vs the Original. While setting up the Duplicate, you can also choose to have the backup copy over only the latest full backup to the extneral disks.

  • pkh's avatar
    pkh
    Moderator
    10 years ago

    You can automate the backup to your USB disks by adding a duplicate stage to the job that you want to save.  If this duplicate stage targets a device pool then you don't have to modify this stage every time you use a new disk.  For each new disk, you just need to define a disk storage on it and add it to the device pool and the duplicate stage will be able to use it.

    To precisely address your concern about pluggin in old disks and having their contents wiped out, by default, if a disk storage is offline for more than 2 weeks, it will automatically be marked as read-only, thus protecting any contents from being wiped out.

  • CraigV's avatar
    CraigV
    Moderator
    10 years ago

    2. If you duplicate the data it would only duplicate the latest backup.

    3. ...when you duplicate, you should be able to specify a different media set. This media set would be set to not append/overwrite, or just set the OPP to 10 years. bear in mind that when doing this, software upgrades are going to have happend multiple times...

    5. Understood!

    Thanks!

     

  • AllisonW's avatar
    AllisonW
    Level 4
    10 years ago

    Duplicates were the plan, yes.  I wasn't clear on whether the retention periods could be different, and/or how the overwriting might work.  I plan on playing around obviously but wanted to have some idea what to expect heading in.  Thanks!

  • AllisonW's avatar
    AllisonW
    Level 4
    10 years ago

    Ah - so I will need to use the pool if I don't want to muck around with changing the backup every time.  I wasn't 100% if that applied to this situation.  Thanks!

     

    Hmmm...that's definitely quite interesting.  However, I'm not sure if it'll ever be offline for 2 weeks; when we remove one and take it to the offsite, we'd grab the next one, and then probably just bring that one in and plug it in that following day, just to be sure it's not sitting around on someone's desk when it needs using.  :-)  We don't have the exact procedure written yet, though, so I'll keep that in mind.  If we do just swap the disk out in under 2 weeks, even if it's just sitting idle, would we be at risk of those being wiped out?  I guess it would just be safest to put the retention periods super high on the duplicates (since it looks like those can be different than the originals) just in case?

  • AllisonW's avatar
    AllisonW
    Level 4
    10 years ago

    Okay; I think I'm mostly clear, but there's still a few little details on how the overwriting/retention/clearing will work that I'm not 100% sure I'm asking clearly enough.  I think I have enough data to give it a few good test tries, though, and hopefully that will clear up the remaining pieces.  Thank you!

  • pkh's avatar
    pkh
    Moderator
    10 years ago
    If your retention period is short and the backup sets on the disk have expired then they will be deleted during the next grooming cycle