Is my backup strategy OTT?

[mike_brooker]

I currently have 2 differential B2D jobs which run Mon-Fri and then full B2D over the weekend.

During the week (usually Monday AM) I backup the B2D jobs to tape, the tapes have the diffs and full’s. I rotate these tapes in a Tower of Hanoi sequence, archiving every 5th set.

Does this seem like a good strategy? I’m thinking of changing to only doing a full B2D every 2 weeks (or even a month) and dump to tape every 2 weeks – is this a good idea?

One reason for me considering changing is that I have recently changed from daily incs to diffs (more disk space available) and it is much simpler to restore data, even over long periods, using diffs.

Any advice appreciated.

[Hywel_Mallett]

Well the answer is that there's no right and no wrong ;)
The disadvantages of your proposed changes are that in the second week your diffs will be larger - possibly approaching the size of a full backup depending upon how much data changes. Also, in the event of disaster, you could lose up to 2 weeks of data if you're only copying to tape that often. Is that acceptable to you?