Backup Exec Newbie - Setting up a new backup scheme

[watergapnomad]

I'm in the process of designing my first ever backup scheme. I'm completely new to managing data backup, and there are some concepts that I don't totally understand. Here's what I've got so far, and what equipment I'll be using.

There are only three servers that I will be backing up, total data is approx 200Gb. I will be doing weekly full backups on Saturdays, followed by differential backups Mon thru Fri nights. There will also be an end of month full backup that will be stored off site for DR purposes.

Equipment being used:
-8 slot tape backup drive
-LTO2 tapes
-Backup Exec 12.5 with Exchange and SQL Agents

I will be using two sets of tapes, the first for Week 1, and then another for Week 2, which will be alternated back and forth every other week.

So my question is this, how many tapes should I be using in each set? Do I have to use eight since the backup drive accepts up to eight tapes? Will it be thrown off if I put less in?

Secondly, since the diff backups each weeknight will probably only be about 5Gb or so at most, do I need to put in five LTO2 tapes (which hold up to 400Gb) into the media pool, one tape for each night? Or is one sufficient, since it could theoretically hold many weeks worth of diffs?

What I don't understand is if BE selects a new tape for each day, or if it will just continue to append to the same tape until it's full and then roll over to the next one.

Perhaps the easier question to ask, is, if you had the backup equipment and servers to backup listed above, what would your backup design be?

Many thanks....

 

[Xemus]

By default, if you set the job properties to append, it will continue to write to the first tape until it is full, then move to tape 2, until it is full. Based on you math, you could probably fit a weeks' worth of data on 2-3 tapes.

In the media properties, however, you can set the overwrite protection for append or simply no-overwrite. If you select no-overwrite, it will not append the data to the same tape.

Backup Exec will not care about how many tapes are in the drive. It will, however, care if you do not have a tape available to write to (either because they are all full, or they are overwrite protected).

http://www.closedsocket.com

 

[lsprowls]

I was flummoxed by this too. What you want to do is to partition your tape slots. For example, if you need two tapes for daily backups and three tapes each for your weekly backups you would create three partitions of two, three, and three slots respectively. To do this, select your tape device (under Robotic Libraries) on the BE Devices tab, and then click "Configure partitions" in the Robotic Library Tasks menu.

After you've created your partitions, you select a partition in the Device field of your backup Policy (in Job Setup). Then only the tapes in the selected partition are used for the backup job.