Disk to Disk to Tape questions ...

[SheltonS]

We have just upgraded our backup server to have 2TB of online disk and are wanting to do a D2D2T backup. Some questions:

1. Is the best way to accomplish a D2D2T backup using the "duplicate backup set" job?

2. When writing to disk, BE uses files ending in bkf. When you do the duplicate job, is all that is written to the restore history for a file is the orginal bkf location or is the fact that it now resides on a tape as well also written?

3. Should you make the bkf default size bigger?

Thanks in advance.

[MAJED_SHARIF]

Hi,
Backup to disk is very popular method for backup rather than on the Tape media. But I personally faced scenarios that out clients facing problem with backup to disk due to shortage of space.

But if you have enough space then you can go on that but remember strictly follow the media rotation strategy otherwise you will be in great flux that what to do or how to handle the information near in future.

Our one client also practicing the backup on tape and also on the hard disk. In this form you simply run the duplicate backup option you can find this in

Jobsetup--> Backup Tasks--> New Job to duplicate backup data.

For more information please read the topic "Duplicating Backed up Data" page number 307 at the BE 9.1 Administrative Guide or the same topic in BE 10.

duplicate job will create the exact duplicate of the job or media after that you or on safe hand in that case if you lose the main backup folder the duplicate data will be available for the restoration.

Again for further detail for duplicate job read the above mention page.

Where as concern about the .BKF file size I have no idea if you have any information about this kindly share with me.

[Paul_Yip]

> We have just upgraded our backup server to have 2TB
> of online disk and are wanting to do a D2D2T backup.
> Some questions:
>
> 1. Is the best way to accomplish a D2D2T backup using
> the "duplicate backup set" job?
>

You could create a policy with two templates. One wll do the backup to tape. The other will duplicate the job when it is finished to tape. I'm not saying that's the best way. I'm not sure what is the best way, but that's how I was told to run it. I have a template with 4 policies. 2 to backup to disk (daily/full backup) and 2 to duplicate to tape (daily/full backup). I would also like to know if there is a better way to do this.


> 2. When writing to disk, BE uses files ending in bkf.
> When you do the duplicate job, is all that is
> s written to the restore history for a file is the
> orginal bkf location or is the fact that it now
> resides on a tape as well also written?
>

After it duplicates to tape, you will see the data as if you actually backed up to tape directly. I did restores on both tape and disk. disk was much faster, but once i deleted the .bkf files off of the disk I was still able to restore from tape without any problems. I thought that if you had to duplicate to tape, you would only get the bkf files and had to restore those in order to restore the original files. But it seems to work fine restoring from tape.

> 3. Should you make the bkf default size bigger?
>

I made my file sizes bigger. It seemed to have increased the speed of my backups. The default size 1gb was around 200mb/min. I increased it to 60gb because my tapes are that size and it jumped up to over 400mb/min. Not sure if that was the reason why, but it works so I'm not complaining.

I'm sure other people have some good tips too...

[Kerm]

2TB of disk? Sounds like you have an iSCSI appliance? If so, format the iSCSI target with at least 16K clusters. If you use the default cluster size, expect BEX to fail at ramdom with a pair of errors - out of space and damaged file.

[Amruta_Purandar]

Hello,

1. Duplicate data:

Duplicate backup set:
You can create a job to duplicate backup data, selecting either to duplicate existing backup
sets or to duplicate backup sets immediately following a scheduled job.

Policy duplicating jobs:
The Duplicate Backup Set template enables you to use a multi-stage backup strategy for backing up data to disk and then copying it to tape. The duplicate backup template does
not replace the existing Duplicate Backup Sets option. Instead, it provides an automated, alternate method of duplicating backup sets. It allows for multiple levels of data
duplication either within the backup window or outside of the backup window.

For more information, refer the admin guide.

VERITAS Backup Exec (tm) 10.0 for Windows Servers Administrator's Guide (English)
http://support.veritas.com/docs/269777

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Backup Exec will duplicate data from the disk to the tape.
Hence you can restore using either. Disk access being faster will restore faster.

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We ope this information helps. If you have any further questions, do not hesitate to revert.

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