Hi,
Forgive me if this has been asked before: I did search, but found nothing that answered my question. If there's a link to another post which has addressed this, please post it here rather than duplicating effort. Thanks. :)
A little background - I'll try and keep it brief while covering all relevant points:
- I have ~100 "client" servers, and one new central backup server (v.10d) with 2TB attached storage.
- I'd like a Monday-Thursday, Friday 1/2/3/4, January-December rotation scheme. We currently do this with tapes; Monday-Thursday is recycled each week, Friday 1-4 is recycled monthly, the Jan-Dec tapes are recycled yearly. The issue of tapes being overwritten at the correct time is easy, as someone manually loads the correct media each night/week.
- They all have to back up overnight (incremental for Mon-Thurs), so I'm going to need more than one concurrent job to get them all finished before 8am. I'm thinking I'll probably split each evening's backup across 10 jobs, 10 servers per job. This makes my life more difficult because of the increased number of jobs I have to manage.
What I've worked out is:
- Monday-Thursday is quite easy. I configure a Media Set with Overwrite = 1 day and Append = 5 days. I configure one job (=10 jobs, don't forget, as I'm splitting the load) and set it to "Append, overwrite if no appendable media available". I target it to my B2D folder which is in this Media Set. Every Monday, the B2D folder will be overwritten. Tues-Thurs will then append to the folder. Easy. (On Monday, I don't care if last Thursday's data is overwritten as I have the Friday backup.)
I can't work out how to configure the Friday 1/2/3/4 scheme, however. My issue is this:
- If I set Overwrite = 5 days and Append = 27 days, this will ensure a 4-weekly rotation. However, when I come back to Friday 1 in the cycle I don't want Friday 4 to be overwritten; I want to keep Friday 4 for at least another 3 weeks in case I need to restore from, say, 2 weeks ago. I want to ensure that it only overwrites the oldest data.
- Because I'm configuring 10 jobs for each Friday, I don't want to create separate jobs for Friday 1/2/3/4 - I'll end up with 40 jobs, which is a bit unmanageable. I'd like the system to handle this for me, if possible.
- It seems like I should be able to use a Media Set and include a number of B2D folders within it. From what I understand, the oldest media will be overwritten first; hopefully this will allow me to keep 4 weeks' worth of Friday backups.
- Perhaps the "Maximum size for Backup-to-disk files" option might help me out, but I can't quite fathom how...
To simplify the question, ignore that I have 10 backup jobs and assume I have 1. The question, then, is:
"How do I configure one job to run every Friday night and have it recycle the B2D media in such a way that it overwrites the oldest data, ensuring that I can always retrieve data from 3 weeks ago?"
I hope that makes sense. If anyone could point me in the right direction (I'd be more than happy to read through a White Paper, if someone can show me where it is), I'd be most grateful.
Thank you!
j.
