Incremental Backup is overwritting data on Full backup

[Qas]

Hello People

I am doing full backup of our server on Friday and Incremental Backups on Monday to Friday. My current Strategy is (I am using Backup Exec 12.5 and I have 7 x 500GB Tapes)

Tape 1             Friday              Full Backup (This Tape is for 1^st and 2^nd week) repeat

Tape 2             Friday              Full Backup (This Tape is for 3^rd and 4^th week) repeat

Tape 3             Monday           Incremental Backup

Tape 4             Tuesday           Incremental Backup

Tape 5             Wednesday      Incremental Backup

Tape 6             Thursday          Incremental Backup

Tape 7                         Monday to Friday         (Duplicate Full Back (Monday) and Incremental Backup (Tuesday to Friday every week) I’ll take this Tape home every day after the duplicating the backup.

What I want is

Tape 1 ----Week 1----   Full Backup on Friday and Incremental Backup of Monday to Thursday

Tape 2 ----Week 2----   Full Backup on Friday and Incremental Backup of Monday to Thursday

Tape 3 ----Week 3----   Full Backup on Friday and Incremental Backup of Monday to Thursday

Tape 4 ----Week 4----   Full Backup on Friday and Incremental Backup of Monday to Thursday

Tape 5 ----Week 5----   Full Backup on Friday and Incremental Backup of Monday to Thursday

Tape 6 ----Week 6----   Full Backup on Friday and Incremental Backup of Monday to Thursday

Tape 7     Monday to Friday      (Duplicate Full Back (Monday) and Incremental Backup (Tuesday to Friday every week) I’ll take this Tape home every day after duplicating the backup every day.

Repeat

Tape 1 ----Week 7----   Full Backup and Incremental Backup of Monday to Thursday

And so on…..

Why I want this and the problem I am facing

The reason why I want this is because this way I don’t have to change the disc every day and I will have the backup of a whole week in 1 Tape instead of 5 different tapes.

The Problem I am facing is that when I use tape 1 to do incremental back after successfully doing full backup, the Monday Incremental backup amends or overwrite full backup (means Full Backup of Friday + Incremental Backup of Monday in one image and Full Backup of Friday + Incremental Backup of Monday + Incremental Backup of Tuesday in one image and so on). This makes harder for me to duplicate the backup in few hours as the size stays the same as full backup size which is around 200GB to 300GB (becasue the incremental backup added data to the full backup image) instead of normal Incremental backup size which is normally around 10gb.

If I use different disk it creates a new image on every disk but if I use 1 disk it overrides data on the same image.

My question is, is there any way I can have full back up on 1 image and Incremental back from Monday to Thursday on different Individual Images on the same disk.

Can some one please guide or help me to fix this problem. I will appreciate your help

Thank you

[Colin_Weaver]

Igoring the Duplication bit for the time being - they way to do you backup sets is something like

Create a Media set with

Overwrite Protection 34 days
Apppend Period 7 days
This is based on your 6 week rotation and needing to set 1 day under 6 weeks total for sum of append and overwrite  period

Then create your full job that runs on a Friday, make sure it starts with Overwrite and uses the above media set
Then create your incremental jobs that run Mon-Thurs and make sure these use the same media set and device, but append.

This can be used for disk or tape backups.

The duplication bit makes things a little more tricky as you will need to
- create a policy and have the above definitions in templates in the policy
- make 2 duplicate templates for the duplication to tape 7. The first template will duplicate the full backup and overwrite the media - the second duplicate will duplicate the incrementals and append to the tape.
- these duplicate templates will use a second media set as Tape 7 will be used every week which have overwrite protection for 2 days and Append Period for 98 hours ( a couple of hours over 4 days and making the total for the overwrite and append periods just under 1 week)

Bear in mind that you cannot duplicate a tape if you ONLY have 1 tape drive



 

[Qas]

Thank you Colin for your quick response

I will do what you said above and will post my comments after a week

[Qas]

Just a Quick Question to confirm Colin that the Duplicate Policy Template of  full backup will run on Monday and the Duplicate Policy Template of Incremental Backup will run every Tuesday to Friday

- Right?

[Colin_Weaver]

Don'rt see why that should not work - the duplicate templates can be set to run immediately after a job finishes or on a schedule - if you use a scheukle bear in mind that if the original job(s) fail for any reason then the duplicate(s) will return an odd error condition as well. If you use the start immediate option it can ( I think) be set to start on sucessful completion.

[Qas]

Hi Colin

I did what you said above, created a new Media

34 Days Overwrite Protection
7 Days Append

Create one Policy with 4 Templates

1-  Full Weekly Backup on Friday with Overwrite Protection
2-  Incremental Backup on Monday to Thursday with Append to media, overwrite to media if no appendable media is available

I still have more than 250 GB space available on the disk

Duplicate media is also the same as you told me.

3- Full Duplicate backup
4- Incremental Duplicate backup

Every thing works except I have the same problem that the Incremental Backup adds data to the same old Full Backup Image. Incremental backup is not making a new image still just appending to old image.

Am I doing any thing wrong?

Please do let me know of your though