Creating a Disk-Disk-Tape Backup

[Adam_Ward]

Hi,

I have a relatively small server farm - I'd like to back them up to disk (a dedicated 838GB RAID-5 array on the backup exec server) and then ship them to tape in the day. i have in mind what i'd like to do - but have no idea where to start - can anyone point me in the right direction with this:

I'd like 5 folders - Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

Each weekday the backup should run (to disk) to the correct folder - Monday would go to Monday, etc.

The following Monday, the backup would overwrite the contents of the Monday folder

Also - i'd like to trigger the completion of the backup job to have a backup to tape job on hold waiting for me to release it and thus backup the disk folder.

Is this easily achieveable? The reason for going to disk first is 2 fold - having readily available backups from the previous week and the reducing backup time window needed from going direct to tape.

any advice greatly appreciated.

Adam

[tom_garrity]

Hi Adam -

I am not certain this will meet your needs, but here's what we do. 

We create all jobs by policies.  The policy includes a primary backup template which backs-up to disk. 

A second template is a "Duplicate Backup Set Template."  It automatically creates a job which offloads the B2D backup to tape.   "Duplicate Backup Set Template" is an option when you create templates.

The B2D runs at the set time.  The tape back-up runs after the disk job completes. 

One nice feature of this approach is that if you must restore from tape, there is no intermediate step.  You select your files directly from tape.

If you are unfamiliar with policies, they are very simple to use.  First create Media, Devices, and Selection Lists.  Then create Policies.  Within the Policy, you'll create templates.  The Policies will automatically create jobs.

I hope this helps.

Tom

[Ironchefoklahom]

Adam, Tom:
Thanks for this discussion.  It's helped me understand the utility of policies.

If I understand them correctly, under Adam's scheme *all* backup jobs created with the Monday policy will place BKF files in the Monday B2D folder, *all* backup jobs created with the Tuesday policy will place BKF files in the Tuesday folder, etc.

What if you wanted to create a Monday policy template but have the jobs write to folders based on other criteria, such as server name?  Is there a way to wildcard in the policy definition, possibly using the %S wildcard?

-Stephen