"Matthew Carpenter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 01/10/2008 10:41:13 AM: > What is the latest recommendation on back up processes? We have > been small enough to do full back ups daily for some time, but > now face time issues with that and need to move to a tiered > option. Is F-I-I-I-I reasonable anymore or is it too risky? I > do not want to be stuck with a bad full back up in an emergency.
Many enterprise backup solutions support disk now. When I had Commvault, I did a full and all my incrementals to a big fat RAID array (simple Dell PowerVault) hanging off my media server (the Commvault piece that drove the tape library too). Once a week I would do what Commvault calls a synthetic full backup to tape for my weeklies. I kept four weeks of incrementals on disk. That gave me fast restores from the incremental backups since they were located on disk, but gave me complete sets of full backups on tape - best of both worlds. At the end of the fourth week, would have the backup on the disk recycle and start over. Dunno if other software can do that too - was a snap with Commvault. Synthetic full backups are backups that are created entirely inside of the backup system - Commvault would basically do a restore internally to the tape drive to create the full backups. You never touched the application servers to do these as they are done entirely inside the backup system, hence the term "Synthetic". A nice way to do it since it doesn't put additional load on your production systems. You can also do backups (synthetic or otherwise) across the WAN for DR - we would just do perpetual incremental backups to remote sites, then at the remote site do synthetic fulls to get viable self-contained backups. If you have enough disk/tape you only have to reset your incremental backups quarterly or every six months - saves on WAN bandwidth. Eric Eskam =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= The contents of this message are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the U.S. Government "The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it." - P. B. Medawar ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~
