Heathe, Rule #1. Don't let your vendors dictate how you run your business :-)
The backup policies used for off-site storage vary based on need. In your case since you need to be able to restore anything from a given day within 90 days, you need to send incrementals off-site. I'm sure the local CE will be able to fix it up for you so that incrementals go to tape also. Since he isn't used to doing something like this, I would make sure that when he is setting up the policy that the retention of the full backups is a week longer than the retention of your incrementals. Jeff On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 1:52 PM, Heathe Yeakley <hkyeak...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm deploying a NetApp Virtual Tape Library at work right now, and I > have an engineer from NetApp coming in to help me set it up. I was > explaining to him how we rotate tapes, and he seemed a little > bewildered at our rotation method. I've never done tape > backup/recovery anywhere else, so to me, our way is "normal", in that > it's the only way I've ever been shown how to do this. > > - - = = Cycle = = - - > > About 99% of our customers are backed up via policies with the > following attributes: > * They get a Full backup 1 night a week and differential-incrementals > the other 6 nights. > * We have an on-site vault where tapes go for a week. After a week, > Iron Mountain comes and gets them. > * We ship Full AND Differential-Incrementals off-site for 90 days > (<--- This is the bullet point that bewilders my VTL engineer) > > In laying out the VTL, my NetApp engineer tells me that he wants to > make a virtual library for all Full backups and a Virtual Library for > the Diffs. I figured we'd just have 1 virtual library for everything. > He explained to me that since we want to write the Full backups out to > physical tape, that we need a separate Virtual Library for the Full > backups on so that we can enable the "Direct Tape Creation" feature on > that VTL. When I told him I needed to write the Diffs to physical tape > also, so that I could send both offsite, he seemed to think that was > really odd. He claims that all the other VTLs he's deployed typically > look like this: > > * Fulls are written to VTL, then to tape (D2D2T). The physical tapes > are then sent offsite for whatever the retention period is. > * Differential-Incremental and Cumulative-Incrementals are written to > the VTL, but then they sit there for maybe 2-4 weeks. They are never > written to tape, and therefore never sent offsite. > > On one hand, I kinda understand the logic here. If the definition of > Differential-Incremental and Cumulative-Incrementals is essentially > differing levels of backups since the last full, it wouldn't make > sense to write incrementals out to tape since next week's Full starts > the process over again. > > However, in the SLA I have with my customers, I state that I can > recover data from any point within a 90 day window. While the chance > is slim, there's always that possibility that I get a restore request > to recover a file from 89 days ago. If I'm only sending full backups > off site, I'd be able to recover the full backup, but I wouldn't have > any incrementals to restore that file to the exact point in time my > customer needs. > > So, I guess my question is: > > How does everyone else handle incrementals? Do you send them offsite > with the Fulls, or do you just have Fulls go offsite and keep > incrementals onsite for X retention period? > > Thank you. > > - Heathe Kyle Yeakley > _______________________________________________ > Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu > http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu > -- Jeff Cleverley Unix Systems Administrator 4380 Ziegler Road Fort Collins, Colorado 80525 970-288-4611
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