GRT discussion and D2D strategies, your input needed

[macinslaw]

1.  What is the Granular Recovery Tech and how is it used, where can I get specific instructions for it and such?

2.  We are going to start disk to disk to tape backups.  Wondered the following:

a.  Should there be a heirarchal folder structure or should we just allow the backups, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly, to jsut store on the drive as a blob?

b.  What is your recommended method to structure these?

Thanks, your assistance is really needed.

[CraigV · Accepted solution]

Hi,

1. GRT means that even though you back up an entire Information Store, you can restore individual emails, contacts, groups of emails etc.
2. a. If I was doing this, and had enough space, I'd create folders for my Daily, Weekly, Monthly etc. jobs, and then once the jobs are created, target them to those specific folders.

Everyone's going to have their ideas on how they'd do it, so check what sort of information you get, and see what's the best option.

[macinslaw]

Thanks Craig.  I appreciate your help.  I was thinking about doing the same thing, but then I have all these options, GRT, Intelligent Disaster recovery (which does this have to be done at the very onset of the backup strategy, or can this be installed at any moment?

The other question that comes to mind is, let's say I create Daily, weekly, monthly, Quarterly and yearly folders.  And lets say there's a rule on each of these "vaults" to allow overwrite every what...week on the daily, monthly on the weekly, quarterly on the monthly, yearly on the quarterly, etc.  When will the old backups be overwritten or deleted?  When the drive is full?  And I see the warning in the admin manual that stated not to delete any of the files on the hard drive, so...how are you supposed to recover the hard drive space without compromising the backups?

-Scott

[Ken_Putnam]

in addition to Craig's comments, you also need to be aware that after you DUPLICATE to tape, if you want to do an individual item restore, BackupExec needs to stage the entire IS  to temp space in order to extract the selected items. 

[macinslaw]

Gotcha...Duplicate, and staging area.  Thanks, Ken!

[macinslaw]

What happens when the drive becomes full?  How does that work?

[CraigV]

You can set your retention period so that it becomes reusable.
If you don't, and your drive becomes full when backing up to it, your backups would fail, much like they would with tape. If you have the correct retention period in place, it overwrites the oldest backup.

[macinslaw]

Thanks, but currently the retension period is only 2 weeks, so far nothing is being overwritten, only appended.  Am I setting something up wrong?

[Ken_Putnam]

so far nothing is being overwritten, only appended.


If all your jobs are defined as Append NONE of your BKF files will ever expire, since all media in an "append family" share one overwrite date, which is reset whenever a backup ends

For B2D jobs, I would recomment never using APPEND for just this reason.  Make all your jobs Overwrite only

[CraigV]

Hi,

Was any of this a solution?

[macinslaw]

Yes, there were many parts to my question, and I have one more small item.  Will the GRT, or granular backup, create a snapshot?  I am seeing snapshots that I didn't create in the restore list.

I gave craig the solution, even though I feel it was more of a "team" effort  between Craig and Ken.  Craig made some good valid points, and Ken drove them home with more information and good solid technical links to back them up.

Thanks to you both.

[CraigV]

They actually need to figure out a way to give part solutions...there are part solutions in a lot of forum queries.
GRT should create a snapshot of your data, more so if using AOFO along with it.

[macinslaw]

Craig...
Okay, so the "img" folders I'm seeing is a direct result of the GRT?

Also, I have a 12 Terabyte Disk backup storage unit that is currently down to 2 Tb.  In trying to hone in these backups we wasted a lot of space, now I don't know how to remove some of the data without screwing up the catalogue in BE.  Any advice?  Or should I start a new thread for this one? 

[Ken_Putnam]

You really should create a new thread

Someone else may have the same or a similar question, and they would never see yours and any responses it may generate