Weekly, Fortnightly or Monthly Full Backup

What are the retentions (incremental,weekly,monthly).

Any business requirements to consider ?

we changed our schedules from weekly fulls with incrementals, to monthly fulls, daily diffrerential incrementals & weekly cumulative incrementals.

This is just "out of the box" backups to tape no other dependencies....

Nicolai, at present we run a Full on a Friday and this is retained for 30Days and then Diff Inc on Mon-Thu with a retention of 7 days, I was thinking of oing a Full on the 1st Friday and have a retention of just over one month (35days) then have the Cumulative Inc tun on every other Friday with a retention of 30 days and then use Diff Inc on the Mon-Thu with the 7 day retention remaining......

Just spotted this in the NBU documentation regarding having the Cumulative and Differential in the same policy:

Do not combine differential incremental cumulative incremental backups within the same Windows policy when the incremental backups are based on archive bit (default).

How can I tell if we are using anything but archive bit???

EDIT: found the article about the archive bit and how to change this, however, this seem to done via the Client Netbackup Restore GUI only, can this be done form the Master or from the Clinet via the Master??

Andy, have you seen any issues with your set-up as this is what I am looking at doing.

Kev

Within "Windows Client" properties "tab" under Host Properties/Clients/client (within Admin Console)

Have had no issues - touch wood - the only one I can envisage is having to do a full restore of a client just prior to the monthly full backup being carried out - will involve the last full plus last cumulative & subsequent differential incrementals.

Just to clarify, our setup for most of our clients follows this scheduling:

Monthly FULL - last Saturday of month (calendar based). yearly retention
Cumulative Incrementals - every other Saturday (frequency based) monthly retention
Differential Incrementals - every other day (Sun - Fri) (frequency based) monthly retention

Hi Kevin.

Thanks for the briefing about the retention's. I serious doubt switching to the new setup will provide more space on the VLS12000 device. Your'e retention's are already relative short. Deduplication boxes like the SAME data many time. If backup data contain new unique data every day you end up with a very expensive disk storage unit and less than expected capacity.

From a dedupe box perspective, all weekly full are really the same data and should not use very much space (unless the change rate on the client are very high).

Just some thought's

Cheers Andy, found the tick box for the archive bit now, thanks for the pointer...

Nicolai, thanks for the observations, whilst disk space is one things we were looking into we also need longer maintenance windows, our full backups for the Wintel policy takes over 36 hours every week due to the full backup, so switching to the Cumulative Inc 3 times a month should give us a better window as the Cumulative should in theory not take so long.

The majority of data is not new per se but changed filesets, not sure if that counts as new or not in a VLS world?

Also the way our policies are set-up with multiple clients per policy this could also mean slower backups so I am looking to move to a one client one policy so this also makes maintenance a lot easier.

Personally Iike the idea of a Daily Incremental, a Weekly Cumulative Incremental, and then a Monthly Synthetic Full.

That way you do one full backup to start with, and after that the client never seens that same load again for backups.

If you use multiplexing on dedupe boxes you create new unique data every day as the same clients never catches the same backup stream with the same clients.

You must configure the VTL drives with MPX count of 1. Could this be the cause of the missing VTL capacity ?

Hi Nicolai, we don't use multiplexing on the VLS, the main issue we have with the VLS is that it was under specified for our backup requirements, all our backups have been moved to the VLS and this has shown up the errors of configutaion, we are looking to increase the capacity of the VLS12000 shortly, withour VLS aet up we also use the low bandwith replication betwen two sites so the data form both are being held on each VLS.

I was hoping that the use of Cumulative Incrementals once a week rather than the full backup would reduce the amount of data being sent to the VLS, would this not be so?

Hi Kevin.

Good you got the multiplexing right.

I really can't say if the change will make additional space on the VLS. But it is worth testing. Give it a shot :-)