Backup Procedure Recommendation

[jchaty]

I am taking over for the admin who is on sick leave. He will be back in a few months and in his absence we received a new tape library; an HP Ultrium 6000 24 Slot Tape Library with two tape drives that support 400GB (800GB Compressed) using Veritas v9.0 Build 4454 using remote agents.

What I need is a recommendation on how to take full advantage of the device and automate the process as much as possible. I would prefer not to baby-sit the backup’s and would like to just remove a few tapes at the end of the week and end of month.

Last week I set up the library to do two simultaneous full backups every night of 18 servers. I have partitioned the slots in the library and used the “network” feature to assign different NIC’s to each back up job beginning at 5pm (Monday – Friday). The servers are either Server 2003 or 2000. We have one Quantum SNAP Appliance (NAS) and I removed the check mark from “Enable NT SMB’s”.

Tape 1 is backing up 262GB (average) at 380MB/min in just under 14hrs. Tape 2 is backing up 329GB (average) at 540mb/m in just over11hrs. I have seen speeds in excess of 600mb/m on both of these drives while watching it’s progress; however the numbers listed above are the ones listed in the logs.

These are full backups each night and I remove the two tapes each morning and replace them with another pair. The jobs overwrite the existing data on the tapes so I am using the “son” method of backup.

The library is solely for off site end of month permanent storage in our safe; we don’t need to rely on these tapes for disaster recovery. For this we use Double-Take which copies the data on these servers bit-by-bit to our disaster recovery site over a T1 and we are using MS’s Shadow Copy feature for immediate file restoration on the Servers.

What I would like to have is a more automated method of backing up the data with a longer timeframe for off site storage. I was considering keeping the unit partitioned and loading it up with the tapes and use a Grandfather/Father/Son method as recommended in the Veritas Help Section. M-F diff backups, Friday gets a full and tape is taken off site. End of month tape goes offsite and the Friday’s are recycled.

My questions pertain to this idea and if it’s feasible, reliable, recommended. Would you recommend this backup procedure or do you have another idea. I am hoping someone out there has a similar setup and would be able to advise me.

Thanks in advance for your information and comments.

 

[jollyreaper]

I have nothing to add to this aside from "ditto!" We have a lot of tools at our disposal here but it's hard to detemrine the smartest/best approach.

We have a tape drive and Vertias and full backups take ages. We also run out of space when we try to do fulls on a biweekly basis with differentials on a nightly basis.

The solution that IT is trying to roll out right now is along these lines: a really big NAS with a portion dedicated as main file storage, a portion dedicated for backup-to-disk. Our daily in-depth backups will be stored on the NAS -- our "oops" storage. If someone does a silly and deletes something they need, we restore from the NAS. The tapes will be our "Oh, crap!" backup. They will take the full backup from the NAS and copy them over on a daily basis. If we suffer some serious server failures, we can at least pull from the tape to get things back online. Long-term "oops" storage will be monthly DVD backups of the file store. If someone says they need to see file xyz from four months ago and the current version isn't good enough, we can hit the DVD and find that copy.

As I said, there are a lot of options out there and it can be a bit daunting to wade through all the info and determine what best practices should be.

I like your idea of backing up offsite via your T1. We have file stores at our remote sites for local access by those users and we're backing them up to the main server via robocopy over the T. We're planning on roating the tapes offsite on a weekly basis but it seems like we really should make that a bit more frequently. The odds of having a disaster that destroys the entire building are low but the threat that represents makes me feel like we should always prepare as if it were going to happen tomorrow.