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D_N1's avatar
D_N1
Level 2
15 years ago

Single job or multile jobs in BE

Hi all,

New to BE (12.5), looking to understand how company XZY has setup their BE policies (I have Netbackup experience, but no BE background). I see one policy that does a daily backup, backup selection contains 4 servers and about 3 volumes per server. Weekly and Monthly selection is the same. Therefore only one job runs for multiple servers. Seems to run ok, failures at times with VSS errors. Would it be better to have one policy per server (aka netbackup) or is this the way BE works?

I would think that having a policy per server would allow admin to stagger start times and troubleshoot individaul failures easier.

 

thanks,


D_N

  • What you said is correct...

    For better troubleshooting purposes and effective maintainance it is better to have multiple backup policies/jobs rather than a single policy/job with multiple servers.

  • basicaly comes down to personal preference (either yours or your boss)

     

    One job with multiple machines/shares/databases (each called a backup set in BackupExec speak) is easier to maintain, but of any of the sets fails, then the entire job is marked failed.

    Conversely, one job per server/database manager, can be more trouble to maintain, but each job is marked as Successful or Failed, leading to a much smaller "failed" ratio

  • I would think that having a policy per server would allow admin to stagger start times and troubleshoot individaul failures easier.

     

    It might be easy to handle if you have only few servers. What if you have > 100 servers. Would you create 100 policies in that case backing up 100 servers. Managing 100 policies itself would be cumbersome.

    Netbackup is totally a enterprise solution where you are backing up thousands of server. In our environment we have 2000 servers backing up with 360 policies with each policy backing up atmost 15 clients. Now we have categorized them in such a way that all dabase servers are in one policy, appication servers are in one policy and so forth.

    As you said you only have 4 servers then it is pretty simple for you to decide your setup. But do consider the future setup, if you organization is expanding and you would be backing up more servers in future then categorize your polices in such a way that 1 policy backup a particular database or application.

     

  • In case of having many clients to backup, it is better to have a policy with multiple clients.

    With NetBackup it is recommended to have a less number of policies.

    Main reason is it supporys checkpoint restart.

    But with BE as Ken said backup of any one server which is part of a big job with some 15 servers fails, full job will be marked as failed and if you restart the job, it will start from the begining again. Which is very time consuming...

  • I know of companies with more than 2000 policies in their NBU environment!

     

    It's all personal preference.  I personally prefer individual policies for each server.