What are most people doing for backups to tape (fulls every week, month etc)?

We backup our server's data to our Backup server's raid5 array (1.6 TB
capacity). A full backup right now is 700 GB, after a month's worth
of incrementals, this can go towards 1 TB.

As of now we do monthly fulls to the harddrive backup server.

We are getting a Superloader3 DLT-S4 (800 native) tape library with an
Ultra 320 SCSI connection directly to the backup server.

I am trying to plan on the # of tapes needed with some overflow
accounted for (within 1 year probably).

What are most people doing when backing up harddrive backups to tape
(a backup of a backup)..

My initial though was to use two tapes for each week in a month,
allowing for overflow. Backup a full backup Monday night to the tape,
a full backup of the HDD backup.. do incrementals to the tape each
night through friday night, then take the tapes offsite. I would
then bring the next weeks two tapes in on Monday and put them in to be
run yet again for a Full the next week.

At the end of every quarter.. one of these sets would be held offsite,
until the next quarter. At the end of the year, say Dec 31st (the
last day of that week), i would take the two tapes offsite and that
would that year's tape backup which would get held offsite permanently
and archived (so 2 tapes a year are kept in an archive vault), but
really these two tapes are just a backup of that last week in
December, not really the whole year.

Any thoughts out there?

wrote:
We backup our server's data to our Backup server's raid5 array (1.6 TB
capacity). A full backup right now is 700 GB, after a month's worth
of incrementals, this can go towards 1 TB.

As of now we do monthly fulls to the harddrive backup server.

We are getting a Superloader3 DLT-S4 (800 native) tape library with an
Ultra 320 SCSI connection directly to the backup server.

I am trying to plan on the # of tapes needed with some overflow
accounted for (within 1 year probably).

What are most people doing when backing up harddrive backups to tape
(a backup of a backup)..

My initial though was to use two tapes for each week in a month,
allowing for overflow. Backup a full backup Monday night to the tape,
a full backup of the HDD backup.. do incrementals to the tape each
night through friday night, then take the tapes offsite. I would
then bring the next weeks two tapes in on Monday and put them in to be
run yet again for a Full the next week.

At the end of every quarter.. one of these sets would be held offsite,
until the next quarter. At the end of the year, say Dec 31st (the
last day of that week), i would take the two tapes offsite and that
would that year's tape backup which would get held offsite permanently
and archived (so 2 tapes a year are kept in an archive vault), but
really these two tapes are just a backup of that last week in
December, not really the whole year.

Any thoughts out there?

I highly recommend the SAGE "Backups & Recovery" guide,
available at http://www.sage.org/pubs/9_backups/ .
It's free to members, and I encourage you to join.

markm75 wrote:
We backup our server's data to our Backup server's raid5 array (1.6 TB
capacity). A full backup right now is 700 GB, after a month's worth
of incrementals, this can go towards 1 TB.

As of now we do monthly fulls to the harddrive backup server.

We are getting a Superloader3 DLT-S4 (800 native) tape library with an
Ultra 320 SCSI connection directly to the backup server.

I am trying to plan on the # of tapes needed with some overflow
accounted for (within 1 year probably).

What are most people doing when backing up harddrive backups to tape
(a backup of a backup)..

My initial though was to use two tapes for each week in a month,
allowing for overflow. Backup a full backup Monday night to the tape,
a full backup of the HDD backup.. do incrementals to the tape each
night through friday night, then take the tapes offsite. I would
then bring the next weeks two tapes in on Monday and put them in to be
run yet again for a Full the next week.

At the end of every quarter.. one of these sets would be held offsite,
until the next quarter. At the end of the year, say Dec 31st (the
last day of that week), i would take the two tapes offsite and that
would that year's tape backup which would get held offsite permanently
and archived (so 2 tapes a year are kept in an archive vault), but
really these two tapes are just a backup of that last week in
December, not really the whole year.

Any thoughts out there?

Sorry about that blank reply!

Generally I think your methodology is sound, with compression those
tapes will almost definitely hold more than 800GB but you'll have to
load them up before you see how much.

How many systems and which platforms? Which backup software are you using?

-Anthony

markm75 wrote:
We backup our server's data to our Backup server's raid5 array (1.6 TB
capacity). A full backup right now is 700 GB, after a month's worth
of incrementals, this can go towards 1 TB.

As of now we do monthly fulls to the harddrive backup server.

We are getting a Superloader3 DLT-S4 (800 native) tape library with an
Ultra 320 SCSI connection directly to the backup server.

I am trying to plan on the # of tapes needed with some overflow
accounted for (within 1 year probably).

What are most people doing when backing up harddrive backups to tape
(a backup of a backup)..

My initial though was to use two tapes for each week in a month,
allowing for overflow. Backup a full backup Monday night to the tape,
a full backup of the HDD backup.. do incrementals to the tape each
night through friday night, then take the tapes offsite. I would
then bring the next weeks two tapes in on Monday and put them in to be
run yet again for a Full the next week.

At the end of every quarter.. one of these sets would be held offsite,
until the next quarter. At the end of the year, say Dec 31st (the
last day of that week), i would take the two tapes offsite and that
would that year's tape backup which would get held offsite permanently
and archived (so 2 tapes a year are kept in an archive vault), but
really these two tapes are just a backup of that last week in
December, not really the whole year.

Any thoughts out there?

On Oct 2, 3:20 pm, AnthonyL wrote:
Sorry about that blank reply!

Generally I think your methodology is sound, with compression those
tapes will almost definitely hold more than 800GB but you'll have to
load them up before you see how much.

How many systems and which platforms? Which backup software are you using?

-Anthony



markm75wrote:
We backup our server's data to our Backup server's raid5 array (1.6 TB
capacity). A full backup right now is 700 GB, after a month's worth
of incrementals, this can go towards 1 TB.

As of now we do monthly fulls to the harddrive backup server.

We are getting a Superloader3 DLT-S4 (800 native) tape library with an
Ultra 320 SCSI connection directly to the backup server.

I am trying to plan on the # of tapes needed with some overflow
accounted for (within 1 year probably).

What are most people doing when backing up harddrive backups to tape
(a backup of a backup)..

My initial though was to use two tapes for each week in a month,
allowing for overflow. Backup a full backup Monday night to the tape,
a full backup of the HDD backup.. do incrementals to the tape each
night through friday night, then take the tapes offsite. I would
then bring the next weeks two tapes in on Monday and put them in to be
run yet again for a Full the next week.

At the end of every quarter.. one of these sets would be held offsite,
until the next quarter. At the end of the year, say Dec 31st (the
last day of that week), i would take the two tapes offsite and that
would that year's tape backup which would get held offsite permanently
and archived (so 2 tapes a year are kept in an archive vault), but
really these two tapes are just a backup of that last week in
December, not really the whole year.

Any thoughts out there? - Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

We have 4 servers via gigabit, backed up sequentially using Symantec
BackupExec 11D, each night.. to the backup server array.. then backed
up to tape from that as of now.. this is the plan (implementing,
finally, in about 2 weeks).