OS 2008 R2 Backup Exec 2010
Before my upgrade to BE2010 I was getting 1.4-1 compression. After the upgrade I was only getting 1.1-1 compression on a Dell dat72 tape drive. My nightly backup which was full no longer fits on one tape so in the interim I began backing up the OS and other files that don't change much to a couple of 1TB flash drives which I rotated out of the office and my user files and databases continued to tape. After two months, I found that the file on the flash drive had grown about 900+GB and the job wouldn't run because of the lack of space. I copied this file to another device and put the retention period at 1 hour and the next joboverwrote the entire file and started again. I erroneously thought that the backup fould only delete a backkup job at a time, but it deleted the whole file about40 backup jobs. If I hadn't copied that file to another device I would have lost everything.
What I am looking for is some best practices, concerns and/or discussion on how I should proceed with the backup. Yell at me if you wish. This backup is being done at a branch and its been hard enough to get them to change the tapes once a day. Even harder to get them to remove the tapes and flash drives from the site consistenly. This is a professional office and there is lots of politics. I worry about starting diff backups and them needing multiple tapes for weeklies and monthlies. Everything was running great until the upgrade. Dell tested and replaced the tape drive and that did nothing to increase compression.
Please provide any comments on how to accomplish this backup and what needs to be backed up and for how long retained. Do I really need to keep OS files very long if we know it is operating effectively. What about other software?
