backing up to disk - 4 week rotation

[nellisonicl]

I’m backing up my servers to disk.  I do the full back up on weekends and incremental backups on week days.

I’m backing this up on a NAS which has a lot of space.

I’m would like to back this up with a 4 week rotation.  That means I will always have 4 weeks of backups on hand.

Week1 – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Weekend Full backup

Week2 – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Weekend Full Backup

Week3 – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Weekend Full Backup

Week4 – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Weekend Full Backup

I don’t know if this is the best way to do it.  But so far, I have created destination folders called full backup and incremental backup.  Inside each of these two folder I have created 4 folders.  Week1, week2, week3, week4.

I will create a separate backup job for each week for the full  backups

I will create a separate backup job for each week for the incremental backups.

So I will have a total of 8 jobs running.

Is this the best approach?

What happens when week4 is completed?  And I start with week1 again.  How do I have it empty the folder for week1 before it puts the new backups into week1?

[pkh]

You just need one B2D folder.  There is no point in having a complicated folder structure. It just complicates things.

Depending on your data retention policy, you create as many media sets as needed.  For example, you might want to keep the weekly fulls for 4 weeks and your daily incrementals for 1 week.  In which case, you would have a full media set with an OPP of 3 weeks and a incremental media set with an OPP of 6 days.  The OPP will ensure that the media is re-cycleable when the times comes.  Your job will just overwrite the old data and you don't have to do any housekeeping to clear out the old ones.

Read this document to understand the OPP and AP

OPP and AP explanationGo to Tools ---> Options and make sure that you have this setting.

Also, read the data management portion of the Admin Guide.

Define a policy with 2 templates, one for your full backups and another for your incremental backups.  Use the scheduling section to set the weekdays for the jobs to run.

Set your jobs to overwrite.  There is no advantage in appending to a disk file, so don't use append.That's it.