Forum Discussion

TGillispie's avatar
TGillispie
Level 4
13 years ago

Backup strategy - choosing daily vs. weekly full, daily incrementals, etc.

For a straightforward EV 10 installation with about 10 TB of only File System Archiving data, using the NetBackup agent for EV to backup vault stores, indexes, etc, how do I choose a backup strategy?

I've searched this forum, read http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH172279 and DOC4933 and the article: https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/enterprise-vault-backups-best-practice and understand the need for and different sources of EV data needing backups, but I cannot find any good advice on trade-offs between daily fulls, weekly fulls, daily incrementals, etc.

Do the trade-offs between various backup strategies (RTO, RPO) that we consider for lets say ordinary file system backups apply equally as much to the EV backups, or is there an advantage - for example - of daily fulls over and above the shorter RTO you generally get with daily full backups (not having to apply daily incrementals to get latest)?

I have seen that closed vault stores (and indexes?) should be backed up less frequenly - perhaps a weekly full only - so my question is more around EV 'non-closed' stores/indexes/etc.

I realize this may be a complex subject - perhaps we could start with a simple strategy and poke holes in it:

Weekly fulls of all EV data

Daily differential incremental (NetBackup term for ordinary incremental of changes since yesterday's backup) of active data and SQL databases.

Retain perhaps a month's work of weeklies and then retain monthlies until tape copies are made.

Thanks.

  • EV integrates well with "backup free" archiving strorage like emc centera. If you use a centera there is no need to backup and you'll have a RPO of 0 and a RTO of some seconds.

    Our replication software "EVnearSync" does the same with any kind of storage!

    http://www.quadrotech-it.com/products/evnearsync/

     

    You might want to read our whitepaper related to that challange.

     

    /Peter

  •  

    Hi,

    What I have seen so far in the industry is a daily incremental and a weekly full. The retention really depends upon each environment. Typically it is 3-4 weeks retention and then duplicated to tape for long term retention.

    Btw the incremental is a must in order to backup and truncate the SQL  transaction logs (unless you already configured a SQL maintenance plan).

    Hope this helps. Cheers,

    Virgil.