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Best backup strategy with autoloader

tvengel
Level 1

Hello,

I'm thinking changing the backup strategy at one of our customer. He currently has :
- Fileserver with 4 TB uses data
- Exchange server with 1.5 TB data
- SQL Server with 200 GB data
- Vmware server with 4 guest (total +- 400 GB data).

The customer has a HP 1x8 Autoloader with an LTO-6250 (LTO-6 , 2.5 TB native, 6.25 TB compressed).

I was thinking partitioning the autoloader (don't looking at compression) as :
Partition 1 - SLOTS 1-2-3-4   (+- 10 TB capacity)
Partition 2 - SLOT 5-6-7 (+- 7.5 TB capacity)
Partition 3 - CLEANING TAPE

Now the part where I'm stuck is the backup strategy. 
I was thinking of using Partion 1 for weekly full backups and Partition 2 for incremental backup, eventually using
partition 2 during the whole month. At the last friday of the month I would use other tape (in partition one) as monthly backup (keeping 2 months) and then a yearly backup. 

So now I'm hoping on your advise what would be the best strategy and the best configuration for Backup Exec 15/16.

Thanks!

Regards,
Tim Van Engeland

3 REPLIES 3

DarthBilly
Level 5
Employee

I think the partitioning will be hard to manage after awhile and what you are trying to do is handled by Media Sets and not partitions.

If you remove the partitioning and just let Backup Exec handle the media you'll be fine. First, set up media sets to what you need.

Full Media Set 5 Days overwrite 2 days append (total 7 days of protection) used for both fulls and incrementals

Monthly Media Set 63 Days (or a 2 months+) overwrite protections. You actually want to not overwrite this until you have another "good" monthly backup.

Yearly Media Set 1 year+ . Again do not overwrite until you have another good yearly.

Second, ask yourself "If the system crashes and I need to recover what's most important to protect and how far back should I restore from?" Do you really need a yearly or monthly backup? Do you need more fulls or can you get by with more incrementals/differentials? How far back can I restore from in the worst case scenario? Lets say you run fulls every night and keep seven days worth, is that better than running one full and 6 incrementals? How much data changes between backups?

To restore from an incremental you will first need the Full and then every incremental in between, but if you ran a full every night, then you would only need that tape. However it would require more tapes. However, to restore from a differential, I only need the Full and the one differential tape.

 

CraigV
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited
Nothing wrong with partitioning, and with only 3 partitions it's easy to manage. I did this for multiple sites and it worked well. This was simply used for a physical way to ensure that each site rep would put the correct tapes (took a lot of hammering away at them to ensure this was done properly) in the correct partitions. Failing that, the jobs would fail so just make sure the correct media is in the correct partitions/slots. I never had a slot for a cleaning tape...took up a valuable space in the libraries/autoloaders, and whenever you run an inventory it runs the cleaning tape and effectively uses 1 of it's "turns". The rest looks fine...just target the jobs appropriately. Thanks!

Nene
Level 6
Partner Accredited

Hi CraigV,

I have gone through your post below. I have a 1/8 autoloader with 3 partitions, but the jobs keeps running for more than 2 days and i have to cancel most times. When another scheduled job runs it just freezes on 0mb and a lot of time i restart the server before i can run a new job successfully.

What do you think the problem can be?