We have installed new BE 2012 server with 16TB disk and 8 tape library and need to now consider a new back-up strategy using both disk and tape.
Previously we have only used tape, and used purely agents over LAN allowing us to pick and choose files/directories to include on the tapes. We had 4 daily tapes doing differentials on weekdays that remain in the library all the time and 4 sets of weekly tapes (2 x 1.5TB DLT tapes) that get taken off site each week after full backup on weekends. Now we have disk storage I want to scrap the dailys differentials and use the disk sotorage for weekly full and daily differentials, and do one weekly "full backup to disk then duplicate to tape".
Our full backup comes in just under 3TB, so fits on 2 tapes. The problem I have found with the new setup is we are using the new VMWare agent to do backups over our iSCSI network of our full ESX environment This works great, but you have to do FULL backups of ALL your vmdk's, and thus cant choose a file-level selection list. And I have now discovered, you cant do 'incrementals to disk' when using SAN-mode or VM level backups, it will only take full snapshots to disk!!, and thus our 16TB will quickly fill up..
How should I do this? The one solution seems to be returning to legacy agent-level LAN backups, and not use the iSCSI/VMWare agent. This seems a backwards step considering we paid for the VMWARE agent and spent a lot of time getting the VMWARE/iSCSI SAN mode backup working.
Am i missing something? Ideally I would love to full backups to disk, then somehow file-level/agent level selection to tape. But no, BE 2012 will not alloow you to do this. You will need to 2 diff jobs I have been told, one for FULL VM level environment (of vmdks) and the other for agent only over LAN.
