Arghh! Help!

[Rockitman]

Just installed 10d on my Windows 2003 server.   Had been trying to get along with the native backup in Windows but it only works half the time. 

Anyways,  BE is a very confusing product to learn.  

I have 10 backup tapes and 1 drive on the server.  These are those LTO Ultrium 2 type of tapes that can hold 200gb uncompressed.   Anyways,  I have only about 25GB of data on the server so I thought an ideal backup rotation would be to just pop in a tape every Monday and have a nightly full backup done each weeknight.

I would then have 10 weeks of history if needed.    My coworker brought up a good point though,  she said,  what happens if you're on Friday, and the tape breaks or gets corrupt.   You wouldn't be able to restore from the day before or even 4 days before,  you'd have to pull out another tape from last week!  

She has a point.

Can somebody suggest a good rotation, utilizing 10 tapes?    I don't want to get into another 2 week rotation where I have to swap tapes on a daily basis,  also I'd only be utilizing the first 25gb of the tape and then rewriting over it every other week.  Seems like a waste of tape.  

I appreciate any thoughts on this matter.   Am going to try to decipher the online manual but it may take a while, the thing is over a 1000 pages long.  Yikes!

Message Edited by Rockitman on 05-29-200712:33 PM

[Ken_Putnam]

Stand alone drive?

you have two choices:

1) Stick a tape in and do as you had planned,  in which case, if the tape goes bad, you do indeed lose everything since the tape was mounted

2) If your data recovery needs permit, you could do weeklies on a 10 week retain, and rewrite the (for example) Monday tape every week (6 day retain)

In this case you could go back to any day since the same day last week, or to Friday  back as many Fridays as you have tapes

(But you would still be using only the first 25 GB of the tape)

[Rockitman]

Thanks Ken for the info.

Quick question:

Currently my backup job is set to append to the tape after any data that already resides on it.

How do I erase the contents of a tape in BE??

I can't see for the life of me where to do this.

[Ken_Putnam]

From the devices tab, right click the tape and select Re-Lable or QuickErase to just rewrite the header.  If you want to overwrite the entire tape. select Long Erase

if you just want to re-use them, drag them to the scratch media set