Backup-to-Disk folders and Overwrite question

[Steven_Servatka]

Hello,

I am using Backup Exec 12.5 on SBS 2008 and have a monthly full backup job to a Backup-To-Disk folder. I understand how to setup the media for overwrite and append but have a question about overwrite. If I set this job media to overwrite after 1 year will it overwrite all 12 monthly backups? My goal is to always keep 1 year of backups from this job and have it just overwrite the oldest month. Is this even possible with BE 12.5?

Thank you.

Steve

[Colin_Weaver]

With the old version of BE you are running (assuming GRT is not involved) , the overwrite of a disk based job will overwrite bkf files that are overwritable as the job decides it needs new files (which of course depends on how much data you backup in a job and the maximum allowed size for a single bkf file. as to how many bkf files it might try to overwrite.)

It will not overwrite all 12 in one go especially as the January files are overwrite protected for 1 year from the end of the job that created them, but the February backups sets would not be overwriteable for another month, so they are not all overwriteable at the same time anyway.

If doing GRT backups then these create IMG folders and not BKF files and these are overwritten when a GRT enabled backup job starts to backup and only as long as they have passed their overwrite expiry (they are actually deleted and new IMG folders are created so not really an overwrite as the foldernames change). Again this means the February GRT sets expire a month later than the January ones so can't be overwritten at the same time.

BTW we do not recommend appending with disk based jobs (so much so that again from BE 2012 onwards we don't let you do it anyway) as such you should probably set all disk jobs to start as Overwrite and then you can forget the append settings in the media set.

PLEASE NOTE: From BE 2012 onwards DLM controls the retention of disk based backup sets and this operates in a different way.

[Steven_Servatka]

Colin,

Thanks for the response.

So if I understand this correctly if each monthly backup creates it's own BKF file then the oldest will be overwritten. Giving me my continual 12 months of backup available for restore? If the BKF file contains multiple backups then I would lose all of them? How do I configure the backup job to create one BKF for each month? Or am I completely missing this?

Thanks

Steve

[Colin_Weaver]

1 BKF file per month would be

a) make sure every thing you are backing up is in the same job and not multiple jobs (as then you don't need to append)

b) make sure the maximum file size of one bkf file is larger than the amount of data that you are backing up ( this avoids spanning where a single job uses more than one bkf file)

BTW set your overwrite protection to something like 364 days and not 1 year as then the January backup will be able to overwrite the previous years January bkf file

Also make sure you have set Backup Exec to use recyclable before scratch

[pkh]

Having a big .bkf file does have its drawbacks. It will take longer to allocate a big file vs. a couple of smaller files. There should be no concern if the job uses multiple files. All these are managed by BE automatically

[Steven_Servatka]

Thanks for your help so far.

I am testing an hourly backup set to overwrite in 12 hours. So if I have it configured correctly I should always have the last 12 hourly backups available for restore.

Having one BKF file for each backup may prove dificult. I do a full backup of some data every 3 months and those can be 2-3TB in size.