Full backups to tape + full/incrementals to disk

[jeremybnz]

We do full backups to tape, mon-fri, I also want to do a weekly full on sunday to disk and then daily incrementals to disk, am I right in thinking the incrementals will be from the last full backup which will likely be the daily tape backup? or am I able to make it reference the sunday disk backup?

Any thoughts?

JB. 

[Kiran_Bandi]

If you are taking daily full backups to tape then why daily incrementals again?

If you are taking full backup weekly once, then take incrementals or differentials during the remaining days of the week.

Regards....

[pkh]

am I right in thinking the incrementals will be from the last full backup which will likely be the daily tape backup?

You are correct.  Incrementals backup changes that have taken place since the last full or incremental backup whichever comes later.

[jeremybnz]

Thanks! So basically what I want to do won't work :(

[jeremybnz]

@Kiran, we intend to do the disk backups to a different site over a gigabit link, we recently had a number of major earthquakes in our city and are paranoid about losing anything, we had a number of our core servers trapped in a building with no power which we weren't allowed into for some time :(

[Ken_Putnam]

am I right in thinking the incrementals will be from the last full backup which will likely be the daily tape backup?

No

The next incremental run, whether to Disk or Tape will be based on the last INCR or FULL, again, whether it was Disk or Tape

I think I would run the FULL/INCR to disk and then Duplicate to tape using a Policy. 

[jeremybnz]

Hmmm the only downside is we don't have enough time in the day to do that, I guess I could run two backup servers tho'? might be the answer!

[Ken_Putnam]

Went back and re-read your original post.

You could do your Daily Incr FIRST to disk, and then your  FULL to tape

But if you are doing Daily Fulls along with Weekly Fulls, why do you want INCR Dailies also?

[jeremybnz]

The incremental dailies are purely because theres not enough time to run two full backups each day, so the idea is:

MON-FRI Full -> Tape

SUN Full -> Disk

MON-SAT Incr -> Disk

And the tape and disk storage are in different physical locations to give us more redundancy :)

[Ken_Putnam]

Jeremy -

Your response seems to have disappeared?

If I recall, you said that there was not time for two full backups daily and you wanted some redundancy, hence the Daily Incrs.

In that case, doing the Daily INCR before the DAILY full would be the only way I could think of, since either a Full or Incr will reset the Archive Bit

[jeremybnz]

Response has appeared again, weird....

So does it do it entirely on the archive bit and not compare against the actual catalog of the last full backup?

[Colin_Weaver]

If you have time to do one full but not two - why don't you do you backups to disk and duplicate them to tape instead. The duplicate job should be able to run into office hours as it should not affect the LAN or the servers being backed up as it takles the data form teh disk backup and writes it to the tape.

[jeremybnz]

That has potential, would be a pain to restore from tape being a two stage process, but it might be a good solution!

[Ken_Putnam]

The only reason that it would be a two step process is if you run GRT backups

If you Duplicate the Disk data to Tape, you can restore all but Exchange individual items directly form tape

(This is what I was getting at in one of my first responses)

[Ken_Putnam]

Whether based on Archive Bit or Modified Time, the Incr will grab files that have changed since the last Full or Incr

[jeremybnz]

Ahhh sounds good, yes we use GRT for exchange but a two step process isn't the end of the world :(