BE 12.5 backup to disc policy

[Astrid_vd_Weijd]

Is it possible with BE 12.5 to create one full back-up to disc and the nights after incremental back-ups which are placed WITHIN the full back-up? Replaced files on the servers that are backed-up will replace the old files in the full back-up to disc and new files will be placed in the appropriate place. The full back-up can then be done once every week or so in stead of daily.

This way I can dramatically decrease the back-up to disc time and still have a full back-up on tape, which is copied afterwards!

The reason is that the back-up to disc is taking waaay too long (600-630 MB/min for 420GB, Dell 2950 with SCSI attached Dell PV114T with single LTO3 drive) whereas the copy to tape is around 4,000 MB/min and compression has already been done. The data is copied of of a SAN (Equallogic PS5000XV) to a DAS (Dell PV220S) to tape (Dell PV114T).
Previously we didn't back-up to disc, speeds were in the 900-1,000 MB/min region. Still the DAS doesn't seem to be the problem seeing the data is copied of it with 4,000 MB/min to tape. 

Tia for your input! AW

[Astrid_vd_Weijd]

If no one here knows if my question is even possible, what is the best place to ask? The support engineer I spoke 'thought' it wasn't possible,

[CraigV · Accepted solution]

I've just checked this out as follows:

1. Created a test B2D folder on my backup server.
2. Created a test GFS policy (I kept the standard options), with Incremental as my Daily job.
3. With every option in the GFS (Monthly, Weekly, Daily), the destination device was the test B2D folder I created.
4. Ran a test of the Daily and Weekly. Both will go to that folder.

Hope this helps. As long as you select the same folder to backup too, there is no reason for your backups to go anywhere else. Simply put, that is their target. From there you can run another job to duplicate your full Daily backup to tape.

PS: I took a look. It appears as if your Incremental job will attach itself to the initial *.bkf file created with your first full backup. So it's going to have 1 file that you can send to disk whenever you want, but allow you to restore from that according to your policy (Incremental, Full etc). Don't forget to duplicate your job to tape though, you might run into problems if you don't, and you want to restore. You need to double-check that your data will restore this way.

[Astrid_vd_Weijd]

Tnx for your reply Craig!

I just found out through wikipedia that what I'm looking for is called a Synthetic backup. Looking at Symantec's website it is possible with the advanced disk-based backup option. I will try your solution, however I don't think Symantec without said option will do as I want.

[Hywel_Mallett]

Synthetic backups are what you want (from the sound of it). As you say, you perform a full backup to disk (the baseline backup), which is duplicated to tape the first night. Then each night after that, an incremental backup takes place to disk, and BE synthesises a full backup duplicate to tape, so you have the speed of incremental backups, plus the convenience of fulls on tape.
The good thing about the ADBO option is that it's not that expensive. Alternatively, if you're not bad at managing your media, you could simply do combinations of fulls and diffs to disk, and duplicate the backup to tape. You might need two tapes to perform a restore, but it's not too painful.