I'm new to NetBackup and could use some help designing a backup strategy for our Domino servers. My employer requires a seven year retention. We plan on using a mix of disk and tape as storage medium. Basically what I envision is keeping monthly full backups on tape for seven years but doing daily incrementals to disk. Any and all help is much appreciated.

Backup strategies are (or should be) designed by management.They should take into consideration the costs involved with the strategy. You say, "My employer requires a seven year retention", but to what level of granularity? Do they want the monthly available for 7 years, or the yearly available for 7 years? Depending on your answer your requirement for backup storage will differ a lot. Keeping the monthly for 7 years, would mean 12 * 7 instances of your data is kept, if its yearly, only 7 instance are kept. On top of that you might have it on disk and tape for at least some of the retention. It best to put all of this into a spreadsheet and see what the strategy costs in terms of disk/tape. Then show them and get approval.

I agree with Riaan. Design is not a backup admin's responsibility. Your management should contact a Veritas reseller or local Veritas office to design a solution that fits retention requirements for different data types and falls within the budget. It does not help if we suggest dedupe solution but your management can only afford basic disk.

We want to keep monthlies for seven years. We are only going to use tape and basic disk. We know what we want to back up. It's just the configuration piece I need help with.

Hi Iravelo, You can create a seperate schedule for monthly backup with 7 year retention in the policy and select below options. 1. enable override policy storage selection in the schedule window to select tape storage unit. 2. enable override policy volume pool and use 7year retention pool if you have one. So the daily schedule will run with disk storage unit defined in the policy and only full backup/monthly schedule will pick the overrided tape storage unit.

You might want to coordinate with the application as well, since a defined 7 year retention may mean that application "clean up" should occur AFTER your backup completes. For example, I run monthly backups I keep for a year, the application was cleaning up some data every 10 days. They needed a restore, and I was only able to give them the last 10 days of the month from last year, because they did not keep an entire month available. Now they keep 45 days on the server... Whatever your 7 year backup cycle, be it weekly, monthy or yearly, make sure you coordinate with whoever is managing the data so that the backup has all the data since the last backup. Also - how often do you expect to recover that data? Is it a legal requirement? No problem. Will the application get requests every month for the last seven years of data to be restored? You may want to consider this as well. One of my groups was restoring 30-40 backups a week, because they only kept 90 days online and got weekly requests for data over a year old. We put all that on some slower storage and now they do no restores at all. Measure twice and cut once, or to put it another way, PLAN, then BUILD. Too many organizations BUILD, RUN, then REBUILD, because plan is a four letter word, lol... Also, DOCUMENT how long things are kept. As a netbackup administrator, having a documented retention allows you to pass audits by simply printing out your retention document. Having the application group sign off on that is also a great way to save yourself, when asked why you cannot restore something beyond what you thought you were expected to do. Getting off my soapbox, I agree. with previous posts, set up a policy with multiple schedules, you can set the specific retention and storage within the schedule, or by creating SLP, and assigning them per schedule. Various audits will work better using one policy with multiple schedules, rather then multiple policies.

Currently we don't perform many restores at the request of users/legal so I don't think that would be much of an issue. Our Notes administator already provided me with the list of directories he wants backed up and how often. Really the only thing missing on my side is the mechanics of the software and the know how to actually implement it.

Help designing backups with 7 year retention

13 Replies

RiaanBadenhorst
Level 6
9 years ago
Backup strategies are (or should be) designed by management.They should take into consideration the costs involved with the strategy. You say, "My employer requires a seven year retention", but to what level of granularity? Do they want the monthly available for 7 years, or the yearly available for 7 years? Depending on your answer your requirement for backup storage will differ a lot. Keeping the monthly for 7 years, would mean 12 * 7 instances of your data is kept, if its yearly, only 7 instance are kept. On top of that you might have it on disk and tape for at least some of the retention.

It best to put all of this into a spreadsheet and see what the strategy costs in terms of disk/tape. Then show them and get approval.
Marianne
Level 6
9 years ago
I agree with Riaan. Design is not a backup admin's responsibility. Your management should contact a Veritas reseller or local Veritas office to design a solution that fits retention requirements for different data types and falls within the budget. It does not help if we suggest dedupe solution but your management can only afford basic disk.
lravelo
Level 3
9 years ago
We want to keep monthlies for seven years. We are only going to use tape and basic disk. We know what we want to back up. It's just the configuration piece I need help with.
MG1989
Level 3
9 years ago
Hi Iravelo,

You can create a seperate schedule for monthly backup with 7 year retention in the policy and select below options.

1. enable override policy storage selection in the schedule window to select tape storage unit.

2. enable override policy volume pool and use 7year retention pool if you have one.

So the daily schedule will run with disk storage unit defined in the policy and only full backup/monthly schedule will pick the overrided tape storage unit.
Genericus
Moderator
9 years ago
You might want to coordinate with the application as well, since a defined 7 year retention may mean that application "clean up" should occur AFTER your backup completes.

For example, I run monthly backups I keep for a year, the application was cleaning up some data every 10 days. They needed a restore, and I was only able to give them the last 10 days of the month from last year, because they did not keep an entire month available. Now they keep 45 days on the server...

Whatever your 7 year backup cycle, be it weekly, monthy or yearly, make sure you coordinate with whoever is managing the data so that the backup has all the data since the last backup.

Also - how often do you expect to recover that data? Is it a legal requirement? No problem. Will the application get requests every month for the last seven years of data to be restored? You may want to consider this as well. One of my groups was restoring 30-40 backups a week, because they only kept 90 days online and got weekly requests for data over a year old. We put all that on some slower storage and now they do no restores at all.

Measure twice and cut once, or to put it another way, PLAN, then BUILD. Too many organizations BUILD, RUN, then REBUILD, because plan is a four letter word, lol...

Also, DOCUMENT how long things are kept. As a netbackup administrator, having a documented retention allows you to pass audits by simply printing out your retention document.

Having the application group sign off on that is also a great way to save yourself, when asked why you cannot restore something beyond what you thought you were expected to do.

Getting off my soapbox, I agree. with previous posts, set up a policy with multiple schedules, you can set the specific retention and storage within the schedule, or by creating SLP, and assigning them per schedule. Various audits will work better using one policy with multiple schedules, rather then multiple policies.
lravelo
Level 3
9 years ago
Currently we don't perform many restores at the request of users/legal so I don't think that would be much of an issue. Our Notes administator already provided me with the list of directories he wants backed up and how often. Really the only thing missing on my side is the mechanics of the software and the know how to actually implement it.
RiaanBadenhorst
Level 6
9 years ago

Create the storage lifecycle policies to use for daily, weekly, monhtly and yearly backups and define the backup locations and retentions within each

Create the policy to be used for the backup

Create schedules for daily, weekly, monhtly and yearly and select the corresponding storage lifecycle policies in each schedule (overriding the storage unit)
Marianne
Level 6
9 years ago
"We are only going to use tape and basic disk." Not possible to use SLPs with BasicDisk in the picture. You would need to rely on Disk Staging. Please read up in Admin Guide 1 as well as all available TNs to get a good understanding of configuration in the first place and how expiration and cleanup works.
jim_dalton
Level 6
9 years ago
If not mentioned already you'll probably need to think about two other issues:

-On tape for 7 years...possible but unlikely. This means you'll need to either retain the same or compatible hardware for the 7 years and also do test restores. Once a year for example. Or you'll need to manage migrating the data from original format to new format eg LTO2 to LTO6 for example.

-These data are not just flat file or are they? Just wondering...if the data are only compatible with certain versions of Notes, then in order to make the backed up data accessible you'll also need to make sure you have an app that can read them.

Jim
lravelo
Level 3
9 years ago
So I've definitely taken your advice on this. I've read up on the disk staging topic and this appears to be something I can implement. I do have one question though that the documentation, as far as I've read, hasn't clarified for me: Say I have one policy that has only one server and has a scheduled daily incremental backups going to a basic disk that I've configured with staging. The staging schedule would be set to run once a week, let's say. Will it actually copy all of the daily backups sequentially to one tape or would it copy each backup to different tapes (one tape for every one backup)?

This is one of the biggest challanges I'm currently having with this software: maximizing the space on tape. I have about 6 Domino servers in my environment that we're going to be backing up. I know for a fact that between those 6 servers that the size of one of the daily incrementals will not exceed the capacity of one LTO-6 tape so I'd want all of those incremental backups to go to one tape. Would I need to create just one policy, put all of those servers in that one policy, set the directories I want backed up and be done with it? Or could I create an individual policy for each server, have them with the same schedule and retention and to use the same storage to get the same effect?