Help with backup schedule

[James408]

I have about 375 GB of space I need backed up.  I have 4 750 GB hard drives configured using RAID 1, so I have 2 750 GB of available space for backup.  I would then want to do a full backup each Sunday, Incrementals during the week, then duplicate the data to tape weekly rotating the same tapes.  However on the first Sunday of the month I need to do a monthly backup to disk then dupolicate to tape the monthly backup.  I'm trying configure a schedule that will work for this configuration.  I was thinking of creating two separate policies.  One for the 1st and 3rd weeks and a second for the 2nd and 4th weeks, but then what would happend with the 5th weeks when they occur, or with the days that occur in the month prior to the first Sunday.  I'm not sure how to handle this. 

Any/all suggestions would be welcome.   Please let me know if you need more information. 

[Kevin_Cotreau]

Before I even think about how you want to do this, the first thing that comes to mind is this: Are these internal harddrives, that have system and data files on them; or are they external (or even internal provided they are still dedicated) and dedicated to the backups?

If they are dedicated, I can see very little reason for them to be RAIDED. In that case, the first thing I would consider is making them 4 drives or striping them to allow you much more flexibility with space.

I would also want to know how big are your typical incrementals for the week.

Post back and I will follow up.

[James408]

These are internal, dedicated hard drives.  They do not have system or data files on them.

I was thinking I should put them on a RAID in case the backup drive failed.  I'm guessing this is not required, or not a valid option.  So I guess if the hard drive were to afail I would lose that weeks backup.  I could use striping, what kind of striping would you recommend with this configuration?

Also, we have about 1 GB of data for incremental backups per week.

Thank you so much for your help.  I was reading some of your other posts and noted you were not going to post in the future.  I am very grateful for any input.

[Kevin_Cotreau]

I am a bit addicted to this lately, and I have not been sleeping well, so I look and answer. I still have mostly pulled back from solving true bugs since it was too much effort to pull the needed information from people. This is more of a how-to, so it is a lot easier.

Honestly, normally I would leave them as 4 individual drives unless you had some regulatory reason to need that redundancy, but since your 375 is exactly half of one drive, we cannot reliably get two backups and incrementals on one drive so disk striping is in order here to make the equivalent of two 1.5GB drives.

The chances of your backup disks, and your main system failing simultaneously are hopefully quite low, but you still have a tape from the previous week to work from. I hope you take them off-site regularly, as I had a client burn down, and they didn't despite many warnings. If disk failure is not acceptable risk, you would need to reconsider your whole methodology and maybe use tapes nightly. Also, I don't think you have enough space to really do what you wanted if you RAID 1 the disks.

Lastly, as you may have read in my other posts, for total disaster recovery, I recommend using an imaging product...either Acronis True Image Server or Symantec System Recovery. Frankly, I don't consider IDR foolproof.

Ok, here is what I would do:

1) Preferably hardware strip (RAID 0) (rather than MS software striping) the disks in pairs of two, effectively giving you two 1.5GB drives. These will now hold three full backups each and your incrementals with no problem. I would also change these to differentials if there is no reason not to. This would make restoration easier. You should have the room, and based on your incrementals estimate, they should still be small and run quite quickly.

2) This might sound funny, but it is to make things simple and clear:

On striped disk one create 4 B2D folders named Week1-Full, Week2-Full, Week3-Full, Daily-Differential (assuming you follow the above advice). You can see that 375*3 =1125 so even with differentials, they will fit easily.

On striped disk two, create 3 B2D folders named Week4-Full, Week5-Full, and Monthly-Full.

You will now create 7 jobs names (right-click and copy the first job you make and then just edit it) named

1 Week1-Full and select the appropriate B2D folder/device, 2 Week2-Full, 3 Week3-Full, 4 Week4-Full, 5 Week5-Full, 6 Monthly-Full, 7 Daily-Differential. Note that the first numbers will keep them in a nice order.

As you create these jobs, you can set each of them to overwrite rather than append, and select the appropriate media set (discussed next), and time. For each week, except for week 5, and the differential, it should be obvious what schedule to set, but for week 5 you have to manually set the dates. Note that the schedule calendar lets you pick weeks 1-4 and a last week. Well last week can be the forth week, and that will set off back-to-back jobs if you have 4th and last selected. Last week is not the 5th week in most cases. So choose "Specific Dates" and go through the calendar and pick every 5th Friday (if that is the day you choose to run your weekly job) for the next few years. It only takes a minute to do.

Make a media set named YourCompany-Overwrite, and set the overwrite protection to 0 and the append period to infinite. If you choose to stick with the incrementals, you will need to make a second media set called YourCompany-Append. Set the OPP to 0 and the Append period to 6 days, and you would associate this with that one daily job. It is not necessary, but you could still do this for a differential backup, but given its nature, it can be overwritten.

It is late, so I hope I didn't overlook anything, but this is a good start. If you have any more questions regarding what I wrote, I will see it in the morning...well, later in the morning.

[James408]

Kevin,

Thanks again, that makes a lot of sense.  I will setup and configure as described however I have a few questions.  When do you recommend doing the Monthly Full Backup and the Weekly?  From what I've read it is a little difficult to setup the Monthly backup during the last week. 

When to duplicate to tape?  I believe anytime but how do I capture those differentials to tape since they will be in a different B2D folder?

How does a differential backup handle multiple changes to a single file?  Say changes were made after a Full Backup that completed on Sunday, change 1 was made to a file on Monday and then change 2 to the same file on Wednesday.  The change 2 was not needed or corrupted the file.  Then the differential is taken Wed evening.  Can I recover the file change made on Monday, or would this only be possible with an Incremental, that was appended to?  Not only do I need to be able to recover from disaster but from user's as well.

I hope this all makes sense.

Thanks!

 

[Kevin_Cotreau]

If you are closed Saturday or Sunday, I would just schedule the weekly backups for 11PM one of those nights, let's say Saturday night as an example. You didn't mention if you were using any remote agents, but if not, those backups are going to be pretty fast since they are local and to disk, which is a lot faster than tape.

As far as the monthly full, based on what you have, you are only going back one month as I described. You could set that to run the first Sunday of every month. Let's face it, unless there are regulatory requirements, I don't see what it matters if it is the last day of the month, or the first Sunday, and yes, it does become a bit more complicated to do at the end of the month. The idea is just to be able to go back 30 days after that first month has passed so do it Sunday night at 11 pm. You can either copy that job after it completes, of just run another montlhy full to tape that is not technically a copy, but pretty close.

Changes to files: If you have incrementals, you could end up with multiple copies of the file with each backup, but with an incremental you would only have the latest copy. If it is really necessary to be able to go back with multiple copies, I suggest that you look at implementing Microsoft Shadow Copies. That is precisely designed to go back from revision to revision of a single file and much better suited for that purpose. It is also very easy, so don't let the document get you.

You can download the document here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/techinfo/overview/scr.mspx

[James408]

Kevin,

Just a few other things.

You said:

Changes to files: If you have incrementals, you could end up with multiple copies of the file with each backup, but with an incremental you would only have the latest copy.

I think you meant differential instead of incremental, correct?

The backups will be using remote agents on a gigabit network and some remote.  Also, two other considerations. First, I have two remote locations connected via VPN, it's a T-1 speed.  What kind of issue might I face with a remote backup?  Is it just time?

Second, I have an Exchange server I need backed up also.  Do I included this in the same backup job as my data?

Thanks for the info on Shadow Copy, I will look into it and determine if I use that or incrementals.  With the configuration which B2D folder or backup job should I duplicate to tape for offsite storage? 

Thanks again this is a huge help!

[Kevin_Cotreau]

Of course, I meant differential there. Sometimes what my mind thinks and my hands type are not the same, and I was honestly tired. You may have seen references here to me not sleeping well  at all lately.

For the remote locations, if you have even 10GB to backup, it will impact your T-1 during business hours too greatly since the backups will run from more than 24 hours, so here is what I recommend. If the server is important enough, and complicated enough that a full disaster recovery may be difficult, I would attach a local USB drive and install an imaging product like Acronis or Symantec System Recovery locally on that remote server. I have one remote server that is nothing more than a domain controller file server with Symantec Corporate AV version 10 on it. That is so easy to recover that I don't feel the need to image it, as an example of one you might not bother with this step. If you have Exchange, SQL running, or SharePoint, I would install and run those imaging programs whether local or remote to guarantee fast recovery. This also precludes the need to buy remote agents for servers on the other side of that T, but the imagins software is about $600 per server, but well worth it.

In addition, I still want to backup the data files I have remotely to tape so I can have them off-site, but how to do it...The answer is Microsoft Distributed File Share. Set one up and it will replicate all the data to a local server, and you can backup the data from that local server. Although there is not normally enough traffic from my remote sites to swamp my T-1's, I still throttle the DFS's bandwidth during the day (it has its own settings to allow this, so you do not have to use your firewall, or other software), and let it use the full bandwidth during off hours.

Personally, I do include my Exchange with my backups unless I have problems, and a reason to segregate it later. One scenario that comes to mind is when you are using a remote agent and the backups fail due to loss of network connection. You will find multiple posts here by me where I say if that becomes a problem issue, then I segregate the jobs by server and run them one minute apart so they just queue up (this is my personal preference over using priorities since it is clearer what I am doing to anyone who follows me) and if one job on a particular remote server fails, the next just starts.

Please private message me with your contact info and where you are located.

[James408]

I was thinking with the remote site I could run the backup job over the weekend.  Then simply run the incremental or differentials during the week, which should complete over night.  I would run DFS, however I don't think it will work since the remote site runs Server 2000.  I may at some point place another server out there running 2003. 

[Kevin_Cotreau]

If you have even just 20GB it will max out your T-1 for 1 day, 6 hours, and 54 minutes. Assuming that your backups from the remote site are not too big you can do it, but that number above assumes you use 100% of the bandwidth the whole time, and that there is no loss of efficiency. Anybody working remotely at that time will be out of luck.

http://www.t1shopper.com/tools/calculate/downloadcalculator.php

OK, what do I say to someone still running Windows 2000? "DON'T."

Not only is Windows 2000 not supported any longer (try to call Microsoft in a server-down situation...MS: "LOL, Sorry"), but it also has to be running on hardware so old that it is ripe for failure.

Lastly, DFS is technically part of Server 2000, but I never used it back then. It will probably still work.

[James408]

Thanks for all of your help.  I think this will get me going.  If I need more assistance, I will reply back to this post, or send you a private message.