Best pratice for backup to Tape

[oleaweel]

Hi, Anyone have a guide for best pratice when regarding backup to tape ? Regards Ole

[CraigV]

Hi,

Depends on what you want to do, how much data you're backing up, what type of device you're backing up too as well.
If you have an autoloader/library, consider partitioning the slots, and assigning the jobs to those slots. It means you know where the tapes go, and allows for better organising.
Depending on the size of your backups and the size of your tapes, you can look at doing FULL backups too. It would mean less tapes being used when restoring.
Use the Symantec drivers, and disable Removable Storage Service if you have any Windows OS lower than 2008.
You didn't mention your version of Backup Exec, but you can also look at downloading the Admin Guide for your particular version. It will also clue you in a bit.

That is about it...

[oleaweel]

Hi

This is the situation.

Version 2010

We take incremental backup daily, and full backup every saturday. A full backup is total 700 gb.
We have a Fujitsu Eternus LT40 with 12xLTO4 tapes connected with fiber.

So what we want is to keep 1 week of full backup on the SAN, and copy this Full backup over to Tape. We dont know how many months we want to keep on
tape, but it guess around 6 months

Regards
Ole

[CraigV · Accepted solution]

OK...

So on your media you write too, you would set an overwrite protection setting of 6 months on disk, and 6 months on tape. This prevents both from being overwritten for this period.
You can also look into running a duplicate job for your Weekly job from disk to tape. This will run a copy of your Weekly backup once it finishes on disk to your tape.

[oleaweel]

Thanks for helping. Just something regarding the duplicate. When I do a duplicate, where does the data transfer from, is it copied a second time from the client or is it duplicated from the backup server ?

Regards
Ole

[CraigV]

When you back up to disk, it creates *.bkf files. All it does is back those up to tape :)

[Ken_Putnam]

To expand on Craig's answer  a little, DUPLICATE differs from BACKP or COPY in that you can restore directly from tape rather than having to restore the BKF files and then restore from them  (GRT backps that have been duplicated to tape must be staged back to disk before you can restore individual items)