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Disk to Disk Backup Best Practices

tolinrome1
Level 5

I'm now ready to back up to SAN and have everything ready to go and ran a few successful test runs. However, I don't know what the best practices are. I'm backing up Exchange DB, SQL BD and files. I read thereis a 2 TB limit on SAN Disks you can use to back up to? What are the best practices you are using? Do I create one folder for all backups or one for every job every day? Any info would be very helpful. I want to make sure to set this up correctly from the beginning. I'm using Backup Exec 2010 R2.
Thanks.

3 REPLIES 3

pkh
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP    Certified

The 2TB limit is not a BE limit.  Is is a disk limitation.  The disk needs to be able to support GPT before it can be used for files bigger than 2TB.

You can use 1 B2D folder if you want to.  There is no requirement to use more than 1.  Since a job can only target 1 B2D folder.  The more B2D folders that you have, you would need to define more jobs.  For example, you have a daily job.  If you have one B2D folder, you can have one job and schedule it to run daily.  If you defined B2D folders for Mon., Tue.,.., Fri, then you would need to define 5 jobs to target each of them.  I prefer to have the minimum number of B2D folder, meaning I have only 1.

Set your jobs to overwrite.  There is no advantage in appending to a disk file, so don't use append.

Also, check the HCL below to make sure that your disk is supported.

BE 2010|2010 R2|2010 R3 Hardware (HCL)

If it is not supported, you should test it for B2D functionality with 

B2Dtest.exe

tolinrome1
Level 5

"Set your jobs to overwrite.  There is no advantage in appending to a disk file, so don't use append."

Overwrite how often?

 

I currently have my backup to tape media set to Overwrite protection period at 5 weeks and append period at 1 weeks.

Ken_Putnam
Level 6

Overwrite how often?

That depends on how long you need to keep your data, how large your backusp are and how large your B2D device is.

If you just want to keep everything you can and start overwriting only when the disk fills, Use only Overwrite jobs and from Tools\Options\Media Management, select the option to "use scratch medai before using overwriteble media in the target media set'