Best Practice

[sdcadmin]

I have the following backup procedure in place.  Each server is set up to have 20 tapes for backup.  The tapes are set up on a 4 week rotation with 5 tapes in for each week.  The backup procedure is to backup the data to disk, then copy from disk to tape.  Differential backups or incremental backups are done during the week (depending on the server and client's stipulations) with full backups done every weekend.  When a particular week's worth of tape fills, I go back to the tape with the earliest allocation date and quick erase the tape.  It usually takes about 1 to 2 months, depending on the server, before all 5 tapes get full.  The last Saturday of the month is when I do full backups of the servers for storage at an offsite facility.  Is this a good process?  Will it cause any problems in the future with catalogs or trying to restore data?

Thanks,

William

[Kiran_Bandi]

You have to duplicate the backup sets on disk to tape using duplicate backup jobs. Using a policy with templates will be the best choice to do this.

And let the duplication process also automated. So that BE will manage the media for you. Create media sets with required overwrite protection and configure jobs to use the appropriate media sets.

Regards....

[sdcadmin]

Hi Kiran,

Yes we used the templates and we let BE manage the duplication process from disk to tape.

[Kiran_Bandi]

Then why doing a quick erase on tape manually?

If you configure media set for duplicate to tape job properly, BE will overwrite the tape once the overwrite protection completes. And BE also uses the oldest among the recyclable media for overwrite operations. 

Thanks....

[sdcadmin]

We have a policy to keep data in the system for 6 months.   I never thought about it, but the tapes are filling up faster than that.  However, we do have the data backed up to disk and that remains for 6 months on-site.  Obviously, we can set the tapes to overwrite protection lower.  That brings me to another question.  If the overwrite date passes and the tape has not filled, will BE overwrite the tape or wait until the tape is full first?

-William

[Kiran_Bandi · Accepted solution]

If the tape is overwritable and the job starts as Overwrite only / Append,overwrite only if no appendable media available, BE will overwrite that tape. If the tape is appendable and if the job starts as Append, BE will append data to that and extends it's overwrite protection from there. So, for disk backups it's always recommended to use Overwrite only with backup jobs and for tape jobs use Append, overwrite if no appendable media is available.

Regards....

[sdcadmin]

Hi Kiran,

Thank you.  I will review our jobs and make sure they are set up that way.