Backup Exec 12.5 B2D Help Configure Backups.

[Estranger]

Hi,

I am trying to configure Backup Exec 12.5 to backup to a 2TB NAS and am having a few issues.

Ideally I would like to have a full system snapshot each Sunday night, Then each weekday night an incrimental backup aswell as a full system state backup. So saturday morning there would be the full backup file from Sunday night, 5 small incrimental backups from the weekdays and the 1 daily system state backup (I believe i only need to most recent of this and dont need several copies of it) so if a file was modified on tuesday but then accidently modified incorrectly or deleted on thursday I can take the correct file from Tuesday nights incrimental backup and restore it.

Firstly would an incrimental backup allow this level of file restore?

I believe I have configured the three backups how they should be but I am getting some strange outcomes:

The Sunday full backup is breaking into several files despite having configured the Maximum size for backup-to-disk files to 320gb (Greater than the total space on the server) and the Maximum number of backup sets per backup-to-disk file to 10 (Server only runs one sql database and only has 3 partitions on the RAID)

The jobs are re-using old B2D000XX.BKF files so my Weekly incrimental backup files from last week were B2D000148 / 149 / 150 /etc.bkf but this weeks Sunday backup has used an old B2D000143.BKF file name allong with B2D000146.BKF and B2D000147.BKF making it very confusing and difficult to tell which files are needed and are part of which days backups.

Ultimately I would like the backups to look like this: 

B2D000160.BKF   Sunday Full

-

B2D000161.BKF   Monday Incrimental

B2D000162.BKF  Monday System State

-

B2D000163.BKF  Tuesday Incrimental

B2D000164.BKF  Tuesday System State (replacing B2D000162.BKF)

-

B2D000165.BKF  Wednesday Incrimental

B2D000166.BKF  Wednesday System State (replacing B2D000164.BKF)

-

B2D000167.BKF  Thursday Incrimental

B2D000168.BKF  Thursday System State (replacing B2D000166.BKF)

-

B2D000169.BKF  Friday Incrimental

B2D000170.BKF  Friday System State (replacing B2D000168.BKF)

-

B2D000171.BKF  Sunday Full (replacing B2D000160.BKF)

-

B2D000172.BKF   Monday Incrimental (replacing B2D000161.BKF)

B2D000173.BKF   Monday System State (replacing B2D000168.BKF)

-

etc

so at any one point there would be the Full Sunday backup, the previous 5 working days Incrimental backups and the 1 System state backup on the NAS. If any one could tell me where I have gone wrong or how I could acchieve the above (or if there is a better method) that would be fantastic.

[Colin_Weaver]

B2D files are overwritten based on teh media set overwrite protection rules and the date they became overwritable (oldest first)

As such which file gets used for which backup kind of depends on the history of the server and the configuration of all your media sets and can result in odd looking sequences of media names within a job - especially with busy servers running multiple jobs with multiple retention periods.

As we don't recommend taking file level copies bkf or img folders away from the b2d location, as long as you are protecting your backup data with long enough overwrite protection periods, why do you need to know a complete set of files for one week? Note if your reason for needing to know is that you are copying the files away then you should look into Duplicate jobs instead.

[Ken_Putnam · Accepted solution]

I would also ask why you are using a MAXFILSIZE of 320GB. 

At first it  may seem that this is a good idea, but if that one file ever gets corrupted (yes, it DOES happend), then your entire backup is gone

if you leave it at the default, and just let BE manage the BKF files, (bearing in mind what Colin has said), then when a BKF file goes bad, all you lose is the data in that one file

Also, if you have selected ALLOCATE MAX to reduce fragmentation, and the backup ever goes above 320 GB even by a few KB, yo have just wasted up to 320 GB of disk space, since you should not be doing APPEND jobs to disk storage

[Estranger]

Thanks for both of your help. I guess it's just the compulsive organiser in me wanting to keep our B2D location neat and organised.

I have made some changes to the backup tasks based on your suggestion and I'll let them run for a week. Hopefully once all the old backups (before the changes) are over written things should be more to requirement.