migrating from tape to backup-to-disk, using backupexec 12.5

Anyone familiar with Backup Exec?

I'm trying to wrap my head around how exactly I should be using
'backup-to-disk' now that I've decided to ditch tapes here for my small
office. Running Backup Exec 12.5.

With tapes, we typically had 1 tape for each day of the week (plus weekends)
and simply rotated through them. We didn't pay much attention to overwrite
protection time. We ran full backups nightly, so each tape had a full
backup from that day of the week.

I'm looking to move to disk, but am not quite sure how I should be setting
it up. Should I create one 'backup-to-disk' folder for each day of the
week, and a different backup job for each day of the week?

Or should I have 2 folders, 1 for a full backup and another for
incrementals? And have 2 backup jobs, one that backs up full on Monday and
the rest that backs up differentials every other day of the week?

Should I be using differential or incremental, what are the advantages of
each? Or should I be doing fulls for each day like I was with tape?

To create an off-site backup, can i just take a file copy of one of the
backup-to-disk folders?

Basically I'm looking for some overall backup advice....

I'm backing up about 40GB of data per server (2 servers).

Thanks in advance.

Kremlar wrote:
Anyone familiar with Backup Exec?

I'm trying to wrap my head around how exactly I should be using
'backup-to-disk' now that I've decided to ditch tapes here for my small
office. Running Backup Exec 12.5.

I don't have much specific advice about backup to disk, nor Backup Exec.
This is just my own general experiences from my years.

With tapes, we typically had 1 tape for each day of the week (plus
weekends) and simply rotated through them. We didn't pay much attention
to overwrite protection time. We ran full backups nightly, so each tape
had a full backup from that day of the week.

I'm looking to move to disk, but am not quite sure how I should be
setting it up. Should I create one 'backup-to-disk' folder for each day
of the week, and a different backup job for each day of the week?

I don't know much about how backups are managed on a disk, but they are
probably very similar to how they are managed on tape. Specifically, the
backups usually are put inside an archive file, so each day of the week
would have a unique archive file name. Thus you may not need to create
special directories for each day of the week, but it really depends on
how your backup software works. As I said, I don't have anything
specific to say about Backup Exec.

Or should I have 2 folders, 1 for a full backup and another for
incrementals? And have 2 backup jobs, one that backs up full on Monday
and the rest that backs up differentials every other day of the week?

Should I be using differential or incremental, what are the advantages
of each? Or should I be doing fulls for each day like I was with tape?

This one I can give you info about. A differential backup is a backup of
all files that have changed since the last full backup, whereas an
incremental backup is a backup of all files that have changed since the
last backup of any kind. So if you do a full backup on Monday, a
differential will backup everything since Monday every time it runs. It
doesn't matter if the differential is being run on Tuesday or Friday, it
will still always look back to Monday for the checkpoint. That means
that that a file that was changed on Tuesday but not since then, will
still keep getting backed up over and over again until Friday.

In an incremental a file that is changed will get backed up only the
night(s) it changes. My suggestion is that incremental is the way you
should go rather than differential. Differential were popular for tapes
because it took too long to change through the tapes to find the right
versions of files, so all files that changed since the last full
would've existed on the latest tape, making it easier to retrieve them.
You don't have this problem on a disk, and you'll save more space on the
disk.

To create an off-site backup, can i just take a file copy of one of the
backup-to-disk folders?

Depends on the backup software. The ones I used, Veritas Netbackup, you
actually needed to use the software itself to create multiple copies of
the tapes. I suspect it would've been the same on disk, as it maintains
the backup indexes for all archives separately in its database. Don't
know if Backup Exec is that complicated or not.


Yousuf Khan