Bacup Strategy Review

[Les_S]

All,

I'm hoping some folks with more experience and knowledge can tell me if the following backup strategy will work or if there's a better way to do it.

The scenario -

We have two tape drives, one 800 GB and one 400 GB.

We have about 4 TB worth of data to protect.

We'd like to have a weekly full backup and Daily Incrementals.

We'd like to run backups at night and only change out two tapes each morning - placing them in a secure location.

Less than 100 GB of data changes daily.

The strategy -

Create 5 FULL backup jobs each one running once a week.  Each of those jobs backs up 1/5 of the total 4 TB and each one runs one day of the week.  IE - The first 800 GB backed up on Monday, next next 800 GB backed up on Tuesday, etc for 5 days to reach the total.  These jobs would use the 800GB tape drive and have a new tape placed in them each morning.

Create 5 Daily Incremental  that correspond to the 5 weekly jobs.  Each of these 5 daily jobs run sequentially every night writing to the same tape in the 400 GB tape drive.

Two media sets created.  The first media set is for the 5 weekly Full jobs and is comprised of 10 tapes for a weekly rotation of media.  The second media set is also 10 tapes, again for a weekly tape rotation. (Since little activity occurs on Sat and Sun, those would be combined with Monday night backup.)

Each weekday we simply put in the appropriate 800 GB tape for that night's Full job and the appropriate 400 GB tape for that night's daily incrementals. - with all 5 daily incrementals being appended to the same tape.

Does anyone see any problems with this approach? 

Thanks.

[Kiran_Bandi]

Hi Les,

We'd like to run backups at night and only change out two tapes each morning - placing them in a secure location.

According to your strategy 5 incrementals will run on each day and writes to 400GB tape. Am i right?

[Les_S]

Kiran,

Yes, that is correct.  We do not expect more than 100 GB of changes per day total for all 5 daily incrementals.

Thanks.

[Kiran_Bandi · Accepted solution]

With 5TB of data to be backedup and standalone tape drives, the backup strategy you mentioned will work fine. I couldn't see any probelem with that. But as the data which needs to be backedup increases in future, you may need to have more tapes to comply with your media rotation strategy.