Backup Retention Standards

[Greg67]

Hello,
I am in the process of re-evaluating our companies backup retention policys. I wanted to get feedback from others who use Netbackup as to what they use in their own envirnments. What I need to know is how frequently you backup certain files and how long do you keep them before expiring those backups? We have mixture of applications and platforms here so any insight to what your setup is would be great. In particualr SQL, ORACLE, EXCHANGE, Financial Applications, user data, Peoplesoft applications, Windows servers, Unix servers etc.
Thanks in advance,
Greg

 

[Vela]

These below are generally what we use although I didn't implement nor do I agree totally with these retention levels..

Financial Applications--usually legal requires these to be 7yr. or infinity which woul be safer if you can spare the tapes-

user data--3 mths FULL 2 weeks incremental

Windows servers--How often do they change? Are these just file system OS backups??

EXCHANGE--Legal requires a 7yr or infinity retention usually for all MAIL and information stores..I got bit on this because the last guy was an idiot

SQL, ORACLE--Databases 3mths You can't do incrementals with Veritas database edition which allows BLIB- "block level incremental of Oracle databases
We are going to implement this soon

Hope this help's

Ryan

 

[Greg67]

Hi Ryan,
The Windows and Unix servers in my original post was just for the server itself, system files etc. This will help.
Thanks for the reply,
Greg

 

[comtec17]

Backup Retention policies are determined by the business functions and needs. These are usually defined by the legal departments and the Security Group.

 

[lenski]

We take a slightly differant view on retention periods in that it is what we can lose over a given period that our SLA is based on. So for example mail files we guarentee to lose no more than 24 hours for the first two weeks, no more than 1 weeks data for the first 5 weeks. What that means in practice is that the incrementals are kept for 3 weeks, weeklys for 6 weeks and monthlys for one year. All data is mirrored between two sites which are backed up inderpendatly for DR. The incrementals in our case are transaction logs not the data files so any restore involves the full and incremetals for the first 2 weeks. We have other retention periods which have been specified by the buisness for example some database buckups are only kept for 84 days but must be a maximum loss of 24 hours for that time. So we have to keep the fulls and incremetals for the full period.

For data the buisness sets what they expext from us in respect of what it needs to be able to restore and I set up a backup policy to match. For OS we set what we think we need to cover ourselves.

 

[Greg67]

Thanks for the input and info.
Greg

 

[hannahsh]

Keep it simple I say

daily backups are replaced on a weekly basis and weekly backups every 3 months with one quarterly main backup kept off site.

We use Volume shadow copy for 90% of our restores now so the need for the backups has been significantly reduced and every main server has been volume manager clustered so we never should or might never need to restore a whole box from tape - thank god.

As regards to legal requirements for e-mail, we have just started to archive all mail more than 3 years old which is available from a remote server in out DC for extra security. A copy is available if required from a spare server I have in the comms room just for safety. We have made strickt limits on the users mailbox now to force them to start archiving their own mail cos its not an IS issue.