Backup strategy - Daily Full

[tmstone835]

I have been trying to get Retrospect 6.5 and 7.0 to emulate our Backup Exec nightly backup schemes. We have a large capacity tape drive that can complete a full backup all our systems onto one Ultrium tape each night. We want a Mon-Fri nightly backup to execute that will run a full backup that overwrites the tape that is currently in the tape drive. We don't care which tape is inserted, we want to automatically overwrite it without user intervention. A secretary pulls last nights tape and inserts the next nights tape every morning.

 

We have 10 tapes labeled Monday A, Tuesday A, Wednesday A...Thursday B, Friday B. We will also be pulling the last tape of the month out of rotation and keeping it for 1 year.

 

It just doesn't appear that there is anyway to do this in Retrospect. This is so easy to do in other backup programs, what do we have to do to get it to happen in Retrospect?

 

Any advice would be helpful.

[natew]

Hi

 

Using "any tape" is really tough in Retrospect. This is by design but not ideal for some users.

 

How reliably will the secretary change tapes?

 

I would create 5 backup sets (monday, tuesday etc. no "a" or "b") Then set up a script that runs recycle backups to the corresponding tape on the corresponding day. Then write labels on the tapes like you have them now moday a, monday b, etc.

 

As long as one of the monday tapes is in the drive on monday the backup will succeed. The same is true for the other days too.

 

The disadvantages are:

-There will be two tapes with the exact same name (1-monday) for each day of the week. The catalog file will only match one of these tapes. Depending on which one you need to restore you will have to rebuild the catalog file before hand.

 

-If the right tape isn't in the drive on the right day the backup will fail. I recommend using the email notification to remind people to change tapes.

 

Thanks

Nate

[bravotech]

I suggest adding a feature to allow overwrite after the MINIMUM PROTECTION PERIOD. This will eliminate the risk of overwriting the most recent backup, without needlessly taking away the admin's flexibility to implement whatever rotation scheme that's most suitable.