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Incremental forever Backup - is there in Netbackup like TSM ??

kkhoo
Level 5

Hi,

Situation
1. New directory is generated daily (according to date “today” – example directory/YYYY/MM/DD).
2. each DD has sub-folders in it. Every sub-folder  has zip files on it (100 over zip files). 1 day size per folder can be 10GB.
3. the files is static and will never change.
4. we intend to perform 1x full backup and forever incremental backup - to back up only the new zip files since last incremental backup).

Questions
1. is this method ideal? what is the implication to other backup images when the first time full backup image expires?
2. do you have any other recommendation/suggestion?

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

Marianne
Moderator
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So,the quick anwer is : 
No. NetBackup does not have Incremental forever like TSM.

Dedupe won't work either because compressed files do not dedupe well. 

All I can suggest is that you change the backup selection from time to time to remove old folders that do not need to be backed up again.
Maybe once a month - e.g. for Oct you will have 2018/10/* with a full backup on the 1st, followed by incrementals for the rest of the month.
Or else, update exclude list before next Full is due. 

I realize that this requires manual intervention and discipline to update policies, but it could be scripted and added to an external or OS scheduler (like cron).

Another option would be to invest in an archiving solution for these zip-files.

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6 REPLIES 6

RamNagalla
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what is the target storage for these backups? if it is something that support deduplications, accelerator enabled Full and increment backups(something like weekly full and daily incr) would be the better choise. because this will not hurt storage utilization as files are redundant from 2nd backup  and provide you more number of Full backups images for immediate recovery for any given directories.

only incremental backups is better way to control the catalog size case of may files) and backup storage( in case of non dedup storage) but it hurts in recovery of full directory( as it need to recovery from multiple images to restore all files in specific directory), it does not hurt if restore are always for specific files not entire directory.

forever incremental still works fine with netbackup, if the first full expires,next backup after the expiry will consider those files are not in backups and attempt to take them in incremental backups.( files should not be deleted in source before the backup).. retentions also play a key role... are you going to put same retention for first full and later incremental?

 

Hi RamNagalla,

Thanks for reply.

The target storage of this backup is to tape. My understanding is deduplication and accelerator does not support tape backup, please confirm.

Same retention period applies to full and incremental backup.

Systems_Team
Moderator
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Hi Kkhoo,

That is correct, deduplication and accelerator do not support tape backup - they are specifically for disk based backups. 

When you duplicate a disk based backup to tape that has been created with deduplication or accelerator, all the original data is rehydrated and everything is written to tape.

The same applies when you backup direct from the client to tape - all data is written.

When backing up to disk using deduplication or accelerator, NetBackup uses inbuilt smarts to only write the data to disk that it does not aready have in its storage pool.  If the data already exists, it creates a pointer to it instead (making things much more efficient).  When it is written to tape, all this data is reassembled (or rehydrated).

Hope this helps,

Steve

Hi Systems_Team,

Thanks for your reply.

Given the situation i mentioned in my earlier post, what is the right approach/way to backup? the full backup is big size.. daily new files (static) is to backup... i dont see point of doing full backup over and over again. By the way, retention is 3Y. If we do the traditional weekly full backup and daily incremental, we will run out of tapes.

Please advise, thanks!

Marianne
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

So,the quick anwer is : 
No. NetBackup does not have Incremental forever like TSM.

Dedupe won't work either because compressed files do not dedupe well. 

All I can suggest is that you change the backup selection from time to time to remove old folders that do not need to be backed up again.
Maybe once a month - e.g. for Oct you will have 2018/10/* with a full backup on the 1st, followed by incrementals for the rest of the month.
Or else, update exclude list before next Full is due. 

I realize that this requires manual intervention and discipline to update policies, but it could be scripted and added to an external or OS scheduler (like cron).

Another option would be to invest in an archiving solution for these zip-files.

Thanks Marianne.

Yes, we are looking to your recommendation.