Understanding DeDup Option

[dominikD]

A few questions regarding the dedup option.

What I do not understand is, is it better to run a combination of full and incremental backups like in a conventional backup2disk scenario, or is it common to run always full backup jobs. I know that other dedup solutions like Avamar always make full backups.

Second questions is regarding backup strategy and media sets with dedupe. Today we have media sets like backup2disk-daily, backup2disk-weekly, backup2disk-monthly, backup2tape-weekly, backup2tape-monthly.

At the weekend we are running a full backup to disk, after that a copy job which appends to tape. And we are backing up incremetal to disk every day. The monthly jobs are fullbackups to disk and then copied with overwrite to tape. All jobs are defined by policies.

So are there any examples of backup strategies with dedup option? Do I need a new new strategy with dedup or does it make sense to go ahead like I did with backup2disk?

I am a bit confused right know.

[dominikD]

Why can only one server be selected in the selection list, if direct access is enabled? So if I have to backup 50 servers via direct access, I have to define 50 different jobs. Really? 

[teiva-boy]

Correct you need 50 different jobs.  

This is not a bad thing.  In fact, I prefer this method for backups.  You should try to think about it, and understand that it's actually EASIER to manage.  It's makes it easier to put servers under maintenance and pause jobs, if one server were to fail, only one job fails, it's easier to restart one simple server backup and not a large job with multiple servers...

That said, I find it easier to manage multiple jobs, and of course if you have a good naming convention to go with the job names

[dominikD]

But how do you manage the scheduling for 50 jobs to run in one night or at the weekend? Or are you starting all jobs at the same time and the setting of the maximum concurrent jobs is taking the control. And how do you handle the media management? At the end of the month, I have the copy everything to tape and the tapes will go to a save. So I have to be sure that everything from these weekend jobs is on tape and nothing else. I think it is quite difficult to handle this and don't waste a lot of unused tape space.