need a good back up schedule

[Lucifudge]

I have a database that needs to be backed up 6 days a week, with one full a week. I also am looking to have the back ups for the longest amount of time possible.

Originally I came up with a plan like the following:

Day Tape Name Type Overwrite Length of Rentention
Monday Monday Inc Yes 1 Week
Tuesday Tuesday Inc Yes 1 Week
Wed Wednesday Inc Yes 1 Week
Thursday Thursday Inc Yes 1 Week
Friday Friday1 Full Yes 1 Month


Monday Monday Inc Yes 1 Week
Tuesday Tuesday Inc Yes 1 Week
Wed Wednesday Inc Yes 1 Week
Thursday Thursday Inc Yes 1 Week
Friday Friday2 Full Yes 1 Month

Monday Monday Inc Yes 1 Week
Tuesday Tuesday Inc Yes 1 Week
Wed Wednesday Inc Yes 1 Week
Thursday Thursday Inc Yes 1 Week
Friday Friday3 Full Yes 1 Month

Monday Monday Inc Yes 1 Week
Tuesday Tuesday Inc Yes 1 Week
Wed Wednesday Inc Yes 1 Week
Thursday Thursday Inc Yes 1 Week
Friday Month 1 Full When Full 6 - 12 months

This schedule continues and also uses a month 2 and month 3 tape every 4th saturday. Since the "Month X" tapes are not overwritten and have new data appended, they will ultimately contain about a year of data each.

Then my boss introduced the requirement to have saturdays backed up. This will go beyond my allotted 10 tapes.

Any one have any ideas?

Thanks in advance

 

[SQLBill]

Why have three tapes for Fridays?

Have two tapes for the Friday jobs (including the monthly one).

1st Friday - Overwrite the Friday tape
2nd Friday - Append
3rd Friday - Append
4th Friday (monthly) - Append to Month tape

Why overwrite on the first Friday of the month? Because you have the full month on another tape (Month 1), so you no longer need all the other Friday backups.

Only problem here is if the database is too big to append to the tape. But then the monthly append won't work either.

-SQLBill

 

[BackupGurus]

This sounds like a high value database and what happens if one of those tapes fail? If you have 1/2 of your fulls backed up on a bad tape when will you know? How much longer would it take to restore all of those Inc.s from the one good full?

This is a trees for the forest issue...invest in more tapes! I like the original 4xFulls plan myself for better disaster recovery capabilities. I'd add in 1 offsite archive on a quarterly basis to be run on Sundays in addition to the 4xFulls. Will you be storing these tapes offsite and if so what's your plan?

With media prices what they are, and from the value you place on this data, less than $100 a tape shouldn't break the bank....

P.S. No, I don't work for Verbatim, 3M, Exabyte, Sony, or any other tape manufacturer...My forte is online storage:

http://www.easiestfilesystem.com