Backup Exec 2010r3 grandfather father son policy help

[danny_t65]

Hi All,

I have currently taken over looking after our backups and at current our backups are not grandfather father son as i think they should be.

At present we have daily incremental backups that run 6 days of the week and then weekly and a monthly backups.

Our daily weekly and monthly backups are not linked in any way they are simply backup of data at that point in time. The way i believe they should work is as below:

Daily Backup at the end of the week link into the weekly backup

Weekly backups at the end of the month link into the monthly backup

I have created a policy as a test to backup data using the grandfather father son method by backing up data daily (differential) weekly full and then monthly full, however the daily and weekly and monthly data are not merged so to speak. I must be missing something somewhere just do not no where!

Any help would be really helpful.

Thanks

Danny

[Colin_Weaver]

Kind of wondering what you mean by linked in?

To most people in IT GFS is just a way to manage how long to retain data by media but G is separate from F and S Although if S is Differential or Incremental then they are dependent on the F

EDIT: Just noticed you used the word merge - are you asking about Synthetic backups where the incrementals are combined with the previous full to become a new full (which is nothing to do with GFS)

EDIT2: Wiki info on rotation schemes, no mention of merging/combining data against GFS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup_rotation_scheme

[danny_t65]

Hi Colin,

Thanks for you reply,

What i am basically trying to do is include daily backups in the weekly backups and weekly backups in the monthly backup so that if someone creates a file on Monday and deletes the file on a wednesday i would be able to retrieve data from the monthly backup tape.

Data is backed up to disk first and then archived off to tape monthly.

Sorry if this is a bit vague i kind of thought this was possible.

Thanks

Danny

[Colin_Weaver · Accepted solution]

OK GFS is not an example of what you ask for. GFS is a compromise for sensible user activity, cost effective media management and reasonable data retention periods for data. It is however a compromise as to maintain a daily backup for any length of time would require a huge number of tapes. It is kind of based loosely around, if a file goes missing that a user uses every day then they will tell you about it very quickly, hence the daily backups only need keeping until that file is in a weekly backup. Similar comcepts then apply to files that are edited or opened less frequently for the weekly and monthly retention.

You might want to read up on "True Image Restore" which may get close to what you want however realistically you will probably need to re-adjust your strategy.

Your other option (fiddly to setup  and has some negative points as the taoes remian onsite and something might happen to them) Is to run a full to tape at the start of week and then append the incrementals to the same tape (or set of tapes) for the dailly backups and then keep this tape (or set of tapes) for a longer time. Starting a new set of tapes eack week

[danny_t65]

Thanks colin, this has answered my question

All The best

Danny