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Weekly, Fortnightly or Monthly Full Backup

Kev_Lamb
Level 6

Hi,

At present I use calendar based schedules on our policies and they run a Weekly Full and Daily Incrementals, the backups are sent to a VLS12000 which uses deduplication, the deduplication is based on Schedules, we arec hitting the buffers regarding space on the VLS with our current set-up.

I was wondering what people opinions are of using more incrementals on a policy, so we could have a Monthly or Fortnightly Full backup and Differential Incrementals inbetween, is there any danger using this method this woudl also free up time for any server maintenance without having to wait for a full backup to complete on the weekend

Does anyone use this type of scheduling and have you had any issues?

 

Any thoughts would be appreciated

 

Kev

Attitude is a small thing that makes a BIG difference
1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

Kev_Lamb
Level 6

Cheers Mark,

At present I am Ok with the assitance everyone has given and have implemented a course of action for the future, just need to get the company to cough up the cash for the EV :)

I will close this thread off

Attitude is a small thing that makes a BIG difference

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15 REPLIES 15

Nicolai
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What are the retentions (incremental,weekly,monthly).

Any business requirements to consider ?

Andy_Welburn
Level 6

we changed our schedules from weekly fulls with incrementals, to monthly fulls, daily diffrerential incrementals & weekly cumulative incrementals.

This is just "out of the box" backups to tape no other dependencies....

Kev_Lamb
Level 6

Nicolai, at present we run a Full on a Friday and this is retained for 30Days and then Diff Inc on Mon-Thu with a retention of 7 days, I was thinking of oing a Full on the 1st Friday and have a retention of just over one month (35days) then have the Cumulative Inc tun on every other Friday with a retention of 30 days and then use Diff Inc on the Mon-Thu with the 7 day retention remaining......

Just spotted this in the NBU documentation regarding having the Cumulative and Differential in the same policy:

Do not combine differential incremental cumulative incremental backups within the same Windows policy when the incremental backups are based on archive bit (default).

How can I tell if we are using anything but archive bit???

EDIT: found the article about the archive bit and how to change this, however, this seem to done via the Client Netbackup Restore GUI only, can this be done form the Master or from the Clinet via the Master??

Andy, have you seen any issues with your set-up as this is what I am looking at doing.

 

Kev

Attitude is a small thing that makes a BIG difference

Andy_Welburn
Level 6

Within "Windows Client" properties "tab" under Host Properties/Clients/client (within Admin Console)

Have had no issues - touch wood - the only one I can envisage is having to do a full restore of a client just prior to the monthly full backup being carried out - will involve the last full plus last cumulative & subsequent differential incrementals.

Just to clarify, our setup for most of our clients follows this scheduling:

Monthly FULL - last Saturday of month (calendar based). yearly retention
Cumulative Incrementals - every other Saturday (frequency based) monthly retention
Differential Incrementals - every other day (Sun - Fri) (frequency based) monthly retention

Nicolai
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Hi Kevin.

Thanks for the briefing about the retention's. I serious doubt switching to the new setup will provide more space on the VLS12000 device. Your'e retention's are already relative short. Deduplication boxes like the SAME data many time. If backup data contain new unique data every day you end up with a very expensive disk storage unit and less than expected capacity.

From a dedupe box perspective, all weekly full are really the same data and should not use very much space (unless the change rate on the client are very high).

Just some thought's

Kev_Lamb
Level 6

Cheers Andy, found the tick box for the archive bit now, thanks for the pointer...

 

Nicolai, thanks for the observations, whilst disk space is one things we were looking into we also need longer maintenance windows, our full backups for the Wintel policy takes over 36 hours every week due to the full backup, so switching to the Cumulative Inc 3 times a month should give us a better window as the Cumulative should in theory not take so long.

The majority of data is not new per se but changed filesets, not sure if that counts as new or not in a VLS world?

Also the way our policies are set-up with multiple clients per policy this could also mean slower backups so I am looking to move to a one client one policy so this also makes maintenance a lot easier.

Attitude is a small thing that makes a BIG difference

Former_Mary_Kay
Level 4

Personally Iike the idea of a Daily Incremental, a Weekly Cumulative Incremental, and then a Monthly Synthetic Full.

That way you do one full backup to start with, and after that the client never seens that same load again for backups.

Nicolai
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If you use multiplexing on dedupe boxes you create new unique data every day as the same clients never catches the same backup stream with the same clients.

You must configure the VTL drives with MPX count of 1. Could this be the cause of the missing VTL capacity ?

Kev_Lamb
Level 6

Hi Nicolai, we don't use multiplexing on the VLS, the main issue we have with the VLS is that it was under specified for our backup requirements, all our backups have been moved to the VLS and this has shown up the errors of configutaion, we are looking to increase the capacity of the VLS12000 shortly, withour VLS aet up we also use the low bandwith replication betwen two sites so the data form both are being held on each VLS.

I was hoping that the use of Cumulative Incrementals once a week rather than the full backup would reduce the amount of data being sent to the VLS, would this not be so?

Attitude is a small thing that makes a BIG difference

Nicolai
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Hi Kevin.

Good you got the multiplexing right.

I really can't say if the change will make additional space on the VLS. But it is worth testing. Give it a shot :)

Kev_Lamb
Level 6

Hi Nicolai,

I have changed one policy so far on one of our Fileservers, we were backing up over 500Gb per week with a Full backup then Diff Inc inbetween these times, I have now set it to Full at the begining of the month and Cumu Inc every other Friday with Diff Inc inbetween, the Full was 569Gb followed by a Cumu Inc of only 19Gb, it is early days yet but i will be looking to see if we do have a saving on the VLS, I will let you know once we have a few weeks worth of data to compare.

The problem we have in the business is we do not have a proper archiveing solution so our Full backups do contain data that has not changed in some instances for over 5 years hence the use of Cumu Inc now so we will no longer be "archiveing" every week as we were doing.

Attitude is a small thing that makes a BIG difference

Mark_Solutions
Level 6
Partner Accredited Certified

You could do with one or two things to reallyhelp here:

1. Disk to back up to which will allow you to run Synthetic Full backups

2. Enterprise Vault to archive those old files off the systems

Just thoughts....

Kev_Lamb
Level 6

Hi Mark,

We are currently looking at an implementation of Enterprise Vault for File System Archive, hopefully we can get this in at the beginning of the new year, this will certainly help with our backups as we are backing up a lot of data that is over 12 months old and has never been touched since.

 

Kev

Attitude is a small thing that makes a BIG difference

Mark_Solutions
Level 6
Partner Accredited Certified

Great stuff - anything else we can help you with in relation to this or are you happy?

Dont know if you can mark a Solution for this one but it is nice for threads to be closed off once all the information needed has been obtained.

Let us know if we can help further

Kev_Lamb
Level 6

Cheers Mark,

At present I am Ok with the assitance everyone has given and have implemented a course of action for the future, just need to get the company to cough up the cash for the EV :)

I will close this thread off

Attitude is a small thing that makes a BIG difference