backup standards

[gagz]

Hi-

I'm trying to find an article or something similar that has some sort of justification written into it deal with media rotation/retention. My company, in my mind, has in the past kept way to much media (daily for 3 months, weekly for 2 years, etc). I am rolling out ArcServe 11 w/ a tape library (from a single drive, manual process), and I wanted to try and justify to them using a standard GFS rotation requiring 20 tapes. Anyone have any pointers?

Thanks.
Marc

 

[vschumpy]

It's unlikely you are going to get a GFS with 20 tapes unless of course you are only using 1 tape per backup - use custom rotation instead.

2 years is not a lot of time to keep backup media these days - some companies are now required by law to be able to restore data from up to 10 years ago.

 

[gagz]

according to arcserve I can get away with one week of dailys, a month of weeklies and close to a year of monthlies with 20 tapes (5,4, and 11 or something like that). My biggest problem is I can't figure out a good rotation otherwise, and we only back up about 150gb on 160/320 tapes.

anyway, we keep back ups a lot longer than that, what i'm saying is i don't see why we need weekly tapes that long... most companies i've talked to just keep the monthlies.

 

[vschumpy]

You know how many tapes it takes if you use GFS, and you know at the moment you should only be using a single tape for each full backup .... sooooo .... providing you have enough backup window - just use a mon-fri full with GFS ?

If you want to play about with the rotation then custom is a lot more flexible than GFS.

 

[davidmichel]

How are we supposed to tell you how long to keep tapes. It is up to you to do that.

Different companies have different requirements. For example graphic houses often need to keep every different version of an image for good. Medical and lawyer practices (interesting that they only practice) need to keep that latest version for good. Now with Sorbain Oxley some have to keep most of the ineter-company correspondence and records for good.

Keep in mind that only one tape for the dailies means that if something happens to that tape all the new data since the last full is gone. That is why the default rotation uses a different tape for each day of the week. Run the #s - cost of # of tapes compared to total value of all the companies data. It does not pay to be cheap on tapes, that is not to say the current setup may or maynot be overkill.

Bottom line is research what type of data is being saved, and the business impact it would have if not available. After that come update with two alternate backup rotations and then make a presentation to the bosses.