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Hourly Incremental Append times

jake213
Level 3

I' am having a tough time with getting this one to work. My situation is as follows.

I've been trying to setup up my Media server backups so an incremental Backup job runs every hour from 6 AM to 6 PM and a Full backup can start anytime after 7 PM. These jobs are run on seperate tapes. However, I' am having a problem getting the append/overwrite times on the Hourly Incremental to be correct. 


I've called Symantec support on this and they told me to set it to Infinite - Append and my overwrite protection to 1 day. Which is what I want, 1 day of Incremental backup's and then Full so I know for a fact that I have all the data on that server. 

Can anyone make any suggestions so that I can get the Hourly incremental tape to start over each day at 0 

Thanks.

Jake

9 REPLIES 9

Ken_Putnam
Level 6

Just to clarify, you want to write an hourly INCR to tape, appending to the same tape, followed by a FULL to a separate tape?   And then reuse the INCR tapes the next day, but a different FULL tape?

 

If so,  set the INCR media set to an APP of 12 hours and an OPP of 10 hours

jake213
Level 3

yes the FULL tape is a completely seperate tape and job. the INCR is from 6 AM to 6 PM and should be overwritten everyday. just a daily incremental to have the most recent backup of the media server. I will try this and let you know how it goes :)

pkh
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP    Certified

 

For the incremental tape, I would set the AP to 14 hours, just in case your last incremental job does not start on time.  The OP should be set to 20 hours so that it is protected during the day.
 
While it is fine to backup your system often, have you thought about trying to restore your system?  If your server crashes between 6 - 7 p.m., i.e. between your last incremental backup and your full backup, you would have to restore 1 full and 12 incrementals to get back your system.

jake213
Level 3

What is your suggestion then? Should I not backup Hourly? I'm doing Nightly Differentials on all my other systems and fulls on Fridays. Should I just do a Full once a night and loop the media server in with my differentials? 

pkh
Moderator
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It all depends on your RPO.  If a daily backup is sufficient, then you don't have to do your hourly differentials.

jake213
Level 3

Well the main objective here is to get the media server up as quickly as possible then get the DC up then Exchange. 

I know Symantec has a product for making system recovery faster. But why would I need it when I have Backup Exec? Can't I restore from Backup Exec?

pkh
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP    Certified

What you are talking about here is RTO (Restore Time Objective) which is the time taken to restore.  RPO (Restore Point Objective) is up to which point in time is your backup good for.  These are two totally different objectives.  If you have a full and 12 incrementals to restore,  your RTO is going to be long.

Often, people forget/confuse the two objectives.  Having a good RPO can sometimes be detrimental to a good RTO.

 

SSR, a separate Symantec product, can do image restores.

jake213
Level 3

What would you do for a good RTO on a media server. Just full backup's and maybe differentials at night? Thats what I' am currently doing for all the rest of my servers. My Media server is the most important server to my operation and I'd like it to be the most current backup and take the least amount of time. I realize that there will some acceptable loss if I want to decrease the amount of downtime i would incur in the event of a disaster, however if you could provide some guidance on what type of backup you would do in my situation. I think by the way you are talking about the incrementals I should do away with them, but if I do what should I put in its place? A differential at night? 


Thanks for all your help so far pkh

pkh
Moderator
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Nobody here can really advise you on what's best for your organisation.  You are the best judge of that.

My note of caution earlier is because often people happily do a lot of backups without considering the effort required to restore a system.  In an emergency, it is difficult enough to gather the media for 1 full backup, let alone 1 full backup + 12 incremental backups.  This is on top of the effort to restore 1 full backup + 12 incremental backups.

I only do a full daily backup.  That is sufficient for my organisation, but it may not be sufficient for yours.