newbie needs help

[prjct]

hello everyone - I am a new retrospect user - os x - and could sure use some help creating a script that will accomplish this -

 

M - F daily backup of database files from Filemaker.

 

one tape per week - doing recycle each day and rotating just two tapes - one every other week.

I want to instruct a client to change the tape every monday morning

 

Is this the "right" way to do this - recycle each day?

Do I need to create backup sets for each day?

 

Any other suggestions are greatly appreciated!

 

Thanks

[twickland]

To come up with an appropriate backup strategy, you will need to decide how long you _might_ need to retain previous copies of the files you're backing up. If you do a Recycle backup each day and swap tapes each week, you will have only two copies of each file: last Friday's backup on the tape not currently in use, and yesterday's backup on the current tape. If you made a mistake yesterday and want to retrieve an earlier version of a file, you might have to go back earlier than you'd like, and if you made a mistake more than a week ago, you no longer have a copy of an earlier "good" version.

 

I'd recommend performing a normal backup for your regular backups, and either a scheduled recycle backup or else a manual recycle at intervals when you want to reuse your tapes.

 

Also think about how you will cope when you find that one of your tapes becomes unreadable (tapes have a way of doing this occasionally). You may want to cycle through three tape backup sets instead of just two.

 

Each set of tapes must constitute a separate backup set, but you can use a given backup set for multiple days of the week.

 

Here's an example of a script schedule that will rotate through three backup sets and perform a recycle backup each Friday, using six Schedulers:

 

1. Normal backup to Set A every 3 weeks on MTWT beginning 1/23/06.

2. Recycle backup to Set B every 3 weeks on F beginning 1/27/06.

3. Normal backup to Set B every 3 weeks on MTWT beginning 1/30/06.

4. Recycle backup to Set C every 3 weeks on F beginning 2/3/06.

5. Normal backup to Set C every 3 weeks on MTWT beginning 2/6/06.

6. Recycle backup to Set A every 3 weeks on F beginning 2/10/06.

[prjct]

Thanks!