"Andy Shook" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 01/25/2008 09:15:38 AM:
> I?ve got to rotate media offsite > and tape are so much more ?travel friendly? than disk. I?m > thinking of some new disk appliance/DAS/whatever and a Dell > LTO4 autoloader (We?re a Dell Premier Partner and me thinks I > won?t get a better price anywhere else) and a booty-load of new > tapes. What would you do? Does your backup software have the ability to create new full backups from incrementals in your library? At a previous agency, we used CommVault. CommVault has the ability to perform a "sythetic full" backup - that is, it will replay incremental backups from within a library to create a new full backup. We did incremental backups to disk. I would also do incremental backups to disk across our WAN to a remote site. At the remote site, to generate stand-alone full backups on tape for archival storage, I would just do a synthetic full backup at the remote site to create my stand-alone backup. We had enough disk at the remote site to maintain at least 4 months of incremental backups. Every four months I would reset the incremental backup at the remote site - i.e. start over with a new full backup and then just do incrementals from there. It worked very well - Commvault was one of the first to support direct to disk too (just a big Dell PowerVault DAS), so we didn't have to buy any fancy tape virtualization disk arrays. I only had to worry about doing large data transfers 4 times a year - and I would just schedule those for a weekend - around a holiday was even better, but usually in two days everything could flow back across the WAN. No more shipping of tape. If I was really WAN constrained, I could just put a bigger pool 'o disk at the remote site and push the incremental out even further - only resetting the incremental once or twice a year - depends on how well you trust your backup software :) I figured quarterly was a good compromise for bandwidth vs. stability of an incremental backup. I would love to get a MAID system like something from Copan Systems - then I wouldn't even have to mess with tape... 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> ~
