Backup Exec 2012 - Media Set advice

[joeyharper]

Hi,

I am setting up media sets for our backups. We currently backup as follows:
 

• Monday: Incremental
• Tuesday: Incremental
• Wednesday: Incremental
• Thursday: Incremental
• Friday: Full
• Saturday: Incremental
• Sunday: Incremental

These backups are backed up to disk and retained for 4 weeks, plus duplicated to the DR appliance (we have two 3600 R2 appliances). This allows us to restore from any day in the last 4 weeks from disk.

We also have a requirement to retain 6 months worth of backups. We have an LTO5 tape library connected to our CASO DR appliance and my next task is to configure the monthly backups. We would retain Month 1, Month 2, Month 3, Month 4, 5 and 6 for 6 months.

I have a couple of questions .

1. As I only wish to duplicate the monthly backups to Tape should I add a schedule to duplicate the full backup to tape the day after the monthly full runs? Presumably if I selected "Duplicate data immediately after source task completes" this would also duplicate the weekly backups.

2. What would be the best way to configure the media sets? As we have a 24 slot library I had thought one media set would be sufficient for the 6 months of backups, but from reading the admin guide and other resources I am unsure if that would be the right option as the append period would be need to last for  6 months. Would it be better to create a "month 1", "month 2" etc media sets and allow them only to append for a few days? If that was the best option would I then need to edit the job each month to select the correct media set?

Any advice appreciated, thanks. I've attached a screenshot of the current backup properties if that helps any.

[Colin_Weaver · Accepted solution]

1) You may also need to choose the ONLY duplicate last full backup setting, as depending on the config it may try and duplicate all the  backups that have not been duplicated if you do not choose that setting

2) depends on if you intend to append to any tape sets, if you do month 1 to a set of tapes, and don't want month 2 to append onto the end of the same set of tapes but start with a new tape, then do not set the append time to much longer than the amount of time you expect your complete set of monthly backups to take to finish, but do set the overwrite protection to either 6 months (which may sometimes mean the tape is kept for 7 months, OR just under 6 months (which you could set in weeks so that tapes are reused more or less every 6 months)

Whether or not you choose to append probably will be linked with whether or not you ever want to take one of the sets of montly tapes out of the library - if you have appended you would have to take the last tape used by the previous month out as well as it would contain the first tape of the month you are interested in.

If you do choose to append then bnbe awware that when teh tape yopu append 2 stops beign overwriet protceted will movbve back

i.e. Tape A is in use whe as the last tape of Month 1 - so it should become overwritable in month 7

Month 2 job runs in Month 2 and fills up the remaining space on tape A and moves the date at which that tape now becomes overwriteable back to Month 8 but leave the other tapes used by Month 1 overwriteable in Month 7