How to construct a mixed schedule

[Jaap_Hartog]

Hi All,

first some statistics:
Veritas NetBackup 6.5.3
Quantum i500 Tapelibrary
Separate Master-, Media- and BMR Bootserver

At the moment we perform 4 daily incremental backups (mo-tu-wed-thu evening)
Our Weekly full backup kicks in at Friday-evening and runs through in the weekend.
All backups have an infinite retention, due to compliancy-demands.

Like many other companies, we too have to observe savings.
So my manager drew a plan to change the retention-periods, in order to be able to reuse tapes.

All incremental backups get an retention period of 3 months.
This applies for the full weekend backups as well, except for :

• the backups being made each first friday+weekend of the month, they get a retention period of 12 months
• the backup being made each first friday+weekend of the year, that one gets an infinite retention.

What is a smart way of making the correct schedules without having to use the built-in calendar and making exceptions from policies ?

Kind regards,
Jaap Hartog

[rjrumfelt]

the calendar schedule?

Your monthly and yearly fulls could be accomodated very well using the calendar schedule.  You just want to make sure your windows dont span midnight.

[Nathan_B]

If not, you could set it up something like this:

Schedule 1: YearlyFull
Retention: infinite
Frequency: 12 months
Window open on Friday

Schedule 2: MonthlyFull
Retention: 12 months
Frequency: 4 weeks
Window open on Friday

Schedule 3: WeeklyFull
Retention: 3 months
Frequency: 1 day
Window open on Friday

Schedule 4: DailyINC
Retention: 3 months
Frequency: 1 day
Window open every day except Friday/Saturday/Sunday whenever

That would allow you to not use Calendar select, but may allow the week that the monthly and yearlies run to shift a bit which you may not want.  I try to avoid cal sched at any and all costs.

[Karthikeyan_Sun]

Only one correction.. schedule 3 frequency would have 1 week

[Michel_G_]

You retention plan sounds similar to our typical backup policy.  We use three schedules, a daily incremental and a weekly full on one retention and a longer retention for a monthly full the first weekend of the month.

Watch out if you're trying to do multiple retentions levels in a SQL policy.  When you create your first schedule it setups an Application Backup that uses that retention.  You can add different schedules with different retentions but when the database backups occur they only use the retention level defined in the Application Backup.

http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/258640.htm details some ways of mixing and matching retentions in a single policy but that solution doesn't work us however.  We've had to schedule our monthly SQL backups via completely seperate policies.

[Michel_G_]

Schedule 3 would work as it is since you only open the backup window for Friday it would have the affect of only running the backup job weekly even with a frequency of 1 day.  I don't know if that's being very nice to the backup server though, making it checking daily only to be denied a window all but once a week.

[Jaap_Hartog]

First of all,
let me say a big THANK YOU to the participants.
You've given me sufficient insight to get this stuff going now.
I chose the calendar option for all except the DailyINC.
WIth the WeeklyFull, I chose the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and last Friday of the month (in the matrix)
with the MonthlyFull, I only chose the first Friday of the month (in the matrix) and chose to exclude manually the 1st friday of each year (until 2016)
with the YearlyFull, I only chose the first Friday each year -manually-  (until 2016)

@Michel G. : Yes we do use SQL backups, but they are not true SQL backups, they are MS Windows NT based.

Next questions in this matter:
The incremental backups are performed "Differential Incremental".  Not all our tapes are entirely full. We would like to switch to "Cumulative Incremental".
As mentioned earlier in this thread, we have 4 incremental backups.
In the case of   "Cumulative Incremental" backup, we would only have to keep the media containing the last inc. backup before the full-backup.
The results of the other 3 backups (mon-tue-wed) could then be expired and reused.
Because of the different Retention-periods (5 days for mon-tue-wed and 3 months for thu) 2 schedules will be necessary, what I wonder about is: will the cumulative data   
of  the "mon-tue-wed"-schedule  be transferred to the "thu"-schedule ?


Could this plan also work for disk staging for the "mon-tue-wed"-schdule, followed by a de-staging for the "thu"-schedule to be written to tape ?


If this could work, would it work in an NDMP-environment ?
We perform Backups from our NAS, by means of NDMP. Somewhere on the NAS, there is an area which we could use for staging (several TB's space).
Can diskstaging handle NDMP ?