For the past 5 years we've been using on of the Backup Exec for Windows products to complete our disaster recovery data backups. We've always done an online, offsite and tape backup of the data files changed that day then a complete (master) backup of the data servers. When I first started doing this 4 years ago our daily modified tape was one AIT-3 tape in that time we've grown to 3- AIT-5 tapes.
As part of our continued security for SAS70 certification we two step the master backups. First creating an online backup then compressing and encypting those .bkf files to tape for archiving. It wasn't till recently we discovered that with Backup Exec 12.5 there is a character limit that was not imposed on previous versions. This is only an issue with the 2 step process. If the "master" job is run directly to tape then it doesn't seem to be an issue restoring files. It is only after restoring the online or .bkf files that the data becomes unrecoverable. By not doing the two step process the tape count for that location's masters went from 4 to 7 AIT-5 tapes.
As we begin a "clean period" for auditing we are re-evaluating how the backups are done and what is the best and most time efficient approach to our backups for disaster recovery.
