Backup Exec 12: Backup to disk and tape rotation scheme

[ralphmaif]

My company has a REO 1.9TB appliance and an ARCVault 24 tape library for backup.  I'm looking for the most efficient way to perform differential backups that would first get put to the disk appliance at night and then shot to tape the following day.  Full backups would be performed on Sunday with the differentials performed nightly afterward throughout the week.  Full backups vary between 360GB - 400GB depending on where we're at in the quarter as there are some folders with scanned images we archive.  I'm having a hard time getting differential backups to tape to work as the system seems to just perform full backups everytime I run it.  Any thoughts on this?

[Hemant_Jain]

Some details required:
What data are you backing up? What is the difference in byte count of differential and full? Are you using archive bit method or modified time method for full and differential? Are they using same selection list?

Thanks

[Ken_Putnam]

I'm having a hard time getting differential backups to tape to work as the system seems to just perform full backups everytime I run it.\


Do you have a full virus scan done every night?  what product?

Several years ago, this problem cropped up because an AV product was resetting the last accessed date at every scan  

Sorry, don't remember which product it was.

[ralphmaif]

There are some MSSQL databases, but mostly what is being backed up are MS Office documents and multimedia (images, videos) content.  Been using modified time, though I think archive bit might be more appropriate.  Using same selection list.  Databases are changed quite a bit throughout the day, but I believe most of the Office and multimedia content is fairly static.

[ralphmaif]

bump

[Hemant_Jain]

Database and file backups have different settings. For database backups, if you are using SQL Agent, you need to set differential by going to "Microsoft SQL" tab in the backup job properties and not "general" tab. The settings under general tab would apply to Files and folder level backup. I assume you have changed to archive bit backup now. Now, the question is have you made sure that it is indeed backup based on archive bit for both full and differential jobs? If by any chance, one is at modified time and the other at archive bit, your strategy would really not work. If using archive bit, can you do a test with ntbackup or something that we can compare with. You may want to keep SQL backups aside, as for them, i am not sure if you have set it to differential in "Microsoft SQL" tab.

Thanks