Backup Scenario with use of CPS

[Corey_Wilson]

Hello all,

We are upgrading from 10d to 11d and looking to take full advantage of CPS. I am planning on using CPS for continuous backup of all my servers. I will do full backups weekly of all data to disk then to tape for offsite storage. Our media server is a PE2950, 2 x 3.6ghz dual core with 4gb of ram connected to an ax150i SAN for our backups at 1gbps. All servers are 1gb connected back to the iSCSI SAN network. Tape drive is a 10 tape autoloader. I would like to keep this off our fibre channel SAN as we are running low on space and would like to avoid the expansion costs for backup space. We will be backing up about 600gb weekly for offsite storage.

I have a couple quick questions about this scenario though.

1) If I take this approach and need to fully restore a server can I restore the server to the most recent weekly full backup then restore the server up to the point prior to the crash using the CPS restore functionality?

2) If taking this approach is there really any advantage to running incremental or differentials daily through the week?

We will be using CPS for servers at fifteen of our remote sites to centralize backup management so I thought we might as well roll out to our data centre servers as well. I have read both the administrator guide for backup exec 11d as well as the admin guide for continuous protection server and there really isn't any scenarios touching on this.

Thoughts or suggestions?

Thank you

[Corey_Wilson]

anybody?

[Corey_Wilson]

I am still curious how others are handling similiar scenarios.

[Philip_Pearson]

I am using livestate rather than CPS, youmight want to look at that as an alternative.

[Corey_Wilson]

How does livestate's functionality compare with CPS? I was not under the impression that livestate offered any kind of solution to performing real time system backups and recovery unless you are refering to the imaging product like acronis enterprise server now called system recovery server.

[Philip_Pearson]

You can only recover to the point of your last incremental, but you can run the incrementals hourly if you want.

It depends on your needs for DR, its actually called system recovery now.

All I do is run system recovery to get all my data in one location and then I run a nightly backup to tape. I still use the exchange agent though but that is the only remote server I backup.

The beauty of system recovery is that you can recover to different hardware so long as you have the drivers.