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Backup configuration

afrancis
Level 2

I've been searching and searching for clear information on the settings for backing up to removable disks (currently RDX, but we're moving to USB 3 drives soon). We are getting backups, have no problems, but want to make sure we're doing it correctly and also to let backups overwrite old backups. (we have other longer term backups that prevent us from needing to keep them longer than 4 weeks at a time)

The impetus for the question is that our 2tb backup drives have filled up, but we're backing up 213gb of data. I find IMG folders more than a year old, and assumed those were supposed to be overwritten, but were not. 

  • We have four drives -
  • Full backup one night per week
  • Differential backup each subsequent night for six nights. 
  • On the 7th day we change to a new backup drive

We want that new backup to overwrite the data from four weeks prior when that drive was last inserted.  In my estimation, this would keep one backup on the drive at a time in an ideal scenario.

Is the correct setup for the media set (that includes these four drives)...

  • Overwrite protect for 4 weeks (starts OPP when the drive is removed at the end of the week of differential backups)
  • Append for 6 days? (update existing backups for six days before protecting?)

One additional question- when setting these settings in the media set properties, is there a coincidental setting in the job properties (Destination>Devices & Media>Media Set>'keep data for 4 weeks')? Right below this option it says, 'When job begins' with the options to overwrite media, append to media, etc... 'When job begins' tells me to allow overwrite of the media, but it doesn't indicate whether this is meant to override the media set properties. 

Any clear help or confirmation that this setup is correct would be welcome. THANKS! 

 

1 REPLY 1

Colin_Weaver
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified

You have tagged you BE version as 2010 -  Backup Exec 2010 (and earlier) used media sets for both disk and tape, hence data will remain on disk until a new job actually tries to overwritte it for those older versions.

Backup Exec 2012 and later use DLM (Data Luifecycle Management) for Disk but still use media sets for tape. For standard disk (and USB) this means that older backup sets will be removed (deleted/reclaimed) within 1 hour of the retention date expiring (unless it is the last backup of the origional data location) - RDX does have slightly different handling from USB and local disks

There is info on DLM in these two blogs:

https://vox.veritas.com/t5/Articles/Automated-Disk-management-and-Data-retention-in-Backup-Exec-DLM/...

https://vox.veritas.com/t5/Backup-Recovery-Community-Blog/Backup-Set-retention-and-expiry-Handling-o...