Solution for Weekly Rotation of Backup Drives

[KRackley]

I'm trying to figure out the best solution for managing my company's external hard drives which are acting as backups that we take home weekly. Here's how we'd like it go:

1. I have two external drives, D Drive and G Drive

2. Week 1, bring in G Drive and connect to server, take D Drive home

3. Scheduled Full Backup runs on Saturday morning

4. Week 2, swap out D Drive and G Drive, take G Drive home

What we currently do is use Storage Pools. I have a storage pool with both G and D drives in it. I set them up as a job to run right after our regular weekly Full backup as a duplicate. Its data retention is 4 weeks. I've also changed the BE settings to "Allow BE to delete all expired backup sets." This way, if one of our external drives gets too big, we won't miss a backup because the space was too small, or if we happen to miss a week to swap them, we'll still have a backup taken. Is this an efficient solution?

One issue I'm curious about is the warning that the external drive is removed. Since we're rotating these drives every week, we need to remove them often. I'm used to the "offline" error messages you get when you remove a drive, but someone else isn't. How do I get rid of them?

We also have two more drives that we'd like to take backups every 6 months. One problem that I foresee in this is setting up a reminder for us to remember to bring the backup drives from home. Does BE have reminders for a soon-approaching job? What are some efficient strategies for doing a biannual backup?

[pkh]

1. The"Allow BE to delete all expired backup sets" option does not have any effect in your case because you would have at least 2 backup sets on your disks. This option is only good for the last backup chain. 2. Three is no way to get rid of the drive offline alert. This is to alert users if they inadvertently cause the disks to go offline. 3. No. There is no reminder facility in BE. You should use your email calendar for any reminders

[KRackley]

Thank you for your response.

I'm not sure what you mean by (1.) What do you mean that it wouldn't have any effect because I "would have at least 2 backup sets" on my disks.

[pkh · Accepted solution]

By default, DLM will not delete the last recovery point of a server.  Suppose you do weekly backup of a server on Sundays and set the retention period to 1 day, your Sunday backup would have expired by Tue. and should be deleted.  However since it is the last recovery point, it is retained until you do the next backup.  This feature is designed to protect the user from himself.

However, if "Allow BE to delete all expired backup sets." is enabled, then DLM will delete the backup on Tue.  Thus from Wed. until the next backup, it would not be possible to recover the server.

In your case, you set the retention period to 4 weeks and is running your jobs on a fortnightly basis, so you would always have at least 2 backup sets on your disk.  You never have a single expired backup set on your disk, so the "Allow BE to delete all expired backup sets." option does not apply.

Furthermore, the backup sets on your disks are duplicates and the "Allow BE to delete all expired backup sets." option does not apply.  Expired duplicate backup sets are deleted when they expire, regardless of whether they are the last recovery point or not.