Deciphering Media Rotation Schedule

[DarkRaven]

For some reason I have brain lock when it comes to getting a good solid media rotation down.

I have a HP DLT 15/30 autoloader.

I do a Normal backup every Sunday at 12:01 am and run differential every night at midnight.

I have a normal media set and a diff media set, I have 7 tapes that I alternate week to week for the normal but for the life of me can not select a good one for the differential backups that run about 8 gig or more a run. "Gonna have a drink, walk around, gotta lot to think about."

 

[Salgak]

Well, I just moved jobs, and from ArcServe to Veritas.<p>

But here's my 2 cents on rotation.<p>

I generally use 4 sets, with new tapes once a month, or a permanent rotating set of 6 tape sets, labeled A-D, and A-F, respectively

In my 4 set rotation, &quot;A&quot; starts on the first week, (I do fulls starting Friday, Midnight, and going on to whenever...), and then the Incrementals Monday through Thursday (differentials work fine as well). At the end of week 4, I pull the tape set, hand it to the boss to take offsite, and crack open a new set of tapes. I label THAT set &quot;C&quot;, rename the old &quot;C&quot; to &quot;D&quot;, and proceed. Likewise, B to C, A to B, and D to A, in the following rotations: the D group is always a tape not more than 4 months in use. Additionally, every 6 months, I come in on Saturday Afternoon, and run a &quot;Total&quot; backup: every file on every box (this is usually on a 3-day weekend, usually Xmas/New Years and 4th of July, or the Federal 3-day weekend that runs closest (i.e. President's Day and Labor Day). THOSE, I take home, as a suspenders-and-belt precaution.<p>

The 6-rotation is a bit simpler, although I tend to replace the entire set over the 9-12 month timeframe.

 

[bhf]

Hi.
I found that the rotation jobs are a bit limited with older versions of BUE. On Novell servers I found it was actually better to run daily jobs on a an individual basis, that is create the jobs for each day and also make sure the tape job is set to erase and overwrite as part of the process.
Maybe a bit more to setting it up but very reliable with the advantage of being able to control each job. Downside - time to set up each individual backup

 

[Zelandakh]

I use:

Daily backup on a Monday to Thursday doing a full every night.
Every Friday I do a full backup with sets named Friday Week 1 through 12 which are reused every 13 weeks. These get recycled (overwritten). Friday Week 13 gets written once and never reused.

This means I don't waste a lot of tapes and can give your data back for every day for a week, every week for a month and every quarter for a very long time...

And I'm backing up over 200GB a night - I choose to full backup every night as I once got burned on a server rebuild that didn't have reliable data!