Generally speaking what we do here is backup to Data Domain then duplicate the image to tape and send the tapes off site once a week.
Prior to Data Domain we backed up to tape then duplicated to tape and sent the dupes offsite once a week. There was a time we sent tapes off every day but that was deemed too expensive by the powers that be. -----Original Message----- From: veritas-bu-boun...@mailman.eng.auburn.edu [mailto:veritas-bu-boun...@mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of judy_hinchcli...@administaff.com Sent: Monday, October 26, 2009 11:27 AM To: hkyeak...@gmail.com; veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] General Backup Question: Offsite tape rotation Yes we send ALL backups off site. If you lost the hard drives or the whole building you would only be able to restore to your last full that is off site. (that is if your onsite physical vault withstands whatever destroyed your building). I send my full's and instrumental's off site the next morning. My only fear is when I have tapes brought back onsite for restores... then if I lose the building I would lose those days a well. -----Original Message----- From: veritas-bu-boun...@mailman.eng.auburn.edu [mailto:veritas-bu-boun...@mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Heathe Yeakley Sent: Sunday, October 25, 2009 2:53 PM To: veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu Subject: [Veritas-bu] General Backup Question: Offsite tape rotation 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 _______________________________________________ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu Proud partner. Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Please consider our environment before printing this e-mail or attachments. ---------------------------------- CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This e-mail may contain privileged or confidential information and is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s). If you are not the intended recipient, any disclosure, copying, distribution, or use of the contents of this information is prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this electronic transmission in error, please reply immediately to the sender that you have received the message in error, and delete it. Thank you. ---------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu