How do you backup your company using 11d?

[ncasagrande]

Currently, we have a 6 servers in our company, all in one rack using a 400/800gb hp drive.  we have 500gb of data that get backed up daily via a full backup, changing tapes every day, 5 days on hand, a friday tape for each friday and a monthly full backup tape....we have exchange / sql databases.  i am guessing only about 100gb's change everyday, so why am i doing full backups every night that take 5 hours???   well my assistant is very resistent to change so i am looking to get some ideas on how to minimize nightly backup time and change tapes less....here is my thoughts from another company i was at and i thought it worked very well, but i am open to all ideas, good or bad....i don't claim to know everything and don't want too either....

monday thru thursday daily change job (~100gb)
friday full job (~500gb)

have 20 tapes, 10 daily's and 10 fridays,

overwrite the daily tapes after 10 week rotation - they should be able to hold 400gb's after 4 daily nightly jobs no problem

this would give me 10 weeks of backups on hand at any given time, nightly times should be about 1 hour i am guessing

tapes only get changed on friday morning (insert friday tape) and monday morning (insert new daily tape)

friday would be complete backup, soup to nuts

i could also throw in a month end job of full backup just to keep on hand i guess




i'm not cheap on buying tapes, but my end goal is to reduce the backup time and tape changes during the week, please give me your thoughts on this, im open to anything....i guess the only problem i might see with this, is the daily tape sitting in the drive for 4 days, would that more likely damage the tape or drive?  also, running a 500gb backup 5 nights a week, can't be helping the tape or drives for increased failure rates.

[CraigV · Accepted solution]

Well, I backup all my sites with full backups each night as follows:

Monday --> Friday - Daily (6PM start time; overwrite protection for 6 days; 2 sets of 5 tapes)
Saturday - Weekly (6PM start time; overwrite protection for 4 weeks; 3 tapes)
Last Saturday of every month - Monthly (6PM start time; Overwrite protection for 12 months; 12 tapes)

That's a grand total of 25 tapes per site.
My reasoning for doing it this way is because restoring from a full backup is the fastest way in which to get the data back. Most of the sites are using LTO3 autoloaders/MSL2024 tape libraries, but 2 of them are hitting the capacity of the LTO3 tape (with 1.4:1 compression I can only get 540GB or so), so we're looking at putting in LTO4 in the near future.

If you're looking at reducing backup times though, then you need to consider using either the differential or incremental backups, where only 1 day per week is a full backup, and the other days are the changes.
Unless you're using an HP StorageWorks 1/8 G2 autoloader (biggest waste of money ever!), your device should be designed to be worked hard. I wouldn't worry about the tapes with the retention period you have on them...that could also be wrong though. If you're only overwriting daily tapes after 10 weeks, you'll be out of scratch media very quickly. Just check that out.

If it were up to me though, I'd leave things as is, unless space was an issue. 5 hours to back up 500GB isn't bad, especially if it's done after hours with minimal impact to the business.

[CraigV]

Hi,

If this was what you were looking for can you mark as a solution?

Thanks!