Links to Backup Plans/strategies

[CaRKiLLa]

You guys have been a great help in the past and I'm hoping to get some help once again.

The company I just started working for doesnt' have any type of backup plan and now wants one completed. Does anyone here have any links with some info on creating a backup plan or scheme with their advantages.

Effectively they want to backup 7 servers to a Sony TSL-9000 8 tape autoloader. It currently has backup exec 7.3 loaded. The full backup is currently only taking up 2 24gig tapes.
Right now some of the questions are, "if they do a full backup on Friday and then incrementals during the week what would happen if joe user creates a file on monday and then it gets deleted on tues or any day before the next full backup, but it isn't noticed until a few weeks later? Then it gets into the rotation schedule and how many tapes to keep.
The company I used to work for did Fulls on the weekend and Diff during the week. Keeping all tapes for a month. At the end of the month 1 set of full and 1 set of diff would be kept at the bank and the others would be put into rotation.
Any help would be great.

 

[bjverzal]

I *always* do full backups *every* night. Anything else becomes too much of a nightmare. That always has been my strategy, and will continue to be so for the forseeable future.

Anything else complicates disaster recovery (define "disaster" as a bomb, storm, electrical problem or user error ... or whatever causes an interruption to normal business).

Even if user Joe creates a file and later that day deletes it - his problem for being careless.

An option you may have is perform backup to disk images. This is faster than tape, so your backup window would be smaller. Then offload the images to tape. The disk images would be online for 24-hours, until the next backup. They are then offloaded again. Keep the offload tapes in a xx day cycle. Furthermore, you can create perhaps 7-days worth of disk images. 100GB of JBOD is available for under $500.

What you need to measure is how many possibilities to plan for in your backup strategy, and when the costs to backup the different scenarios begin to outweigh the value of the data.

Bill.

 

[Guest_imported]

Full backups are advisable at all times. I had to do a restore today and its so much easier if you know that all the data will be on one tape.

Backupexec is nice to use if you want to monitor everything form one workstation. I have had to revert to ntbackup on several servers because of problems with backupexec though.

Ntbackup scheduled through the use of batch files and Winat is also quite effective.

 

[CaRKiLLa]

Thanks alot guys, you have been a great help... Sorry for the late reply. It seems if anything could break on the servers, it has. = Right now we're going to do Full backups on the weekends and then Differentials during the week with a 12 week tape rotation. Every fourth week a full set will be taken to keep in the bank. On the 13th week (start of new rotation) we are planning on adding a new set of tapes to replace the ones going to the bank. Depending on how many tapes the full backups take, we may also switch to doing a full on Wed. and Weekend.

How does this plan sound to some of you?