Backup Exec Deduplication best practices.

[Bengaul]

Hi,

We are thinking of moving to deduplication on 2010, and was wondering what everyone is doing re backing up their data. Currently, we have 5 B2D folders, one for each of the weeks of the month, plus a spare. We do a full weekly, and incremental daily. 

With only one media server, and therefore one dedupe folder, what would be the best practice? I have heard that people are doing one full backup, and then infinite incremental. Or should I stick to weekly backups, and daily incremental?

I have read the following best practice guide, as well as the 2010 BE Administrators guide, but was hoping for a bit of real world experience!

Any help appreciated.

Ben.

[RahulG · Accepted solution]

I guess you should go for Weekly full and daily  incremental

[Bengaul]

Thanks for getting back.

May I ask why that is the best option? What advantage does that give me over the backup full and infinite incremental?

Many thanks,

Ben

[Ken_Putnam]

If you do it your way, if you ever get into a Disaster Recovery situation, you would need that first full and EVERY incremental ever taken

Rahul's way you would need the last FULL and only the subsequent INCRs

[teiva-boy]

I'm not sure why you would do an "incremental forever," setup.  You still need to do the fulls regardless for complete recovery.  Are you going to recover the very old FULL, and than each incremental since then for a recovery?  Some types of backups (i.e. file backups only) you can do a synthetic, but I am not sure this is supported with the dedupe option, I think not actually?

At the very least a differential would make better sense from a full recovery standpoint.

Now as far as 5 B2D's vs a single dedupe storage folder, that's out of the window, but you'll still need B2D's for certain items, or at least some of the space for restores possibly.  Dedupe is not the magic bullet for backup...  The very least, you may still have media sets defined for your weekly's and daily's.  

That said, just make sure to have a solid export to tape strategy if tape is still in the picture for off-site needs.  

Lastly, the real magic with dedupe, is the ability to do client-side dedupe.  This allows you to send multiple concurrent data streams to disk, improving backup times, and throughput.  Leverage this as much as you can, which fits within your architecture.  

[pkh]

When you use dedup, your 2nd and subsequent full backups will be somewhat like incremental, only the changed chunks are backed up.  The only drawback of doing full backups is that all the files need to be sent to the media server if you are doing server-side dedup.  If you are using client-side dedup, then only the changed chunks travel across the wire.

[Bengaul]

Hi,

Thanks for the information. Food for thought. How does everyone else do it?