Backup Strategy

[readwrite]

Hi,

 

I'm trying to determine the best stategy for backing up our company data. The requirement is to backup 600GB of data from a fileserver and 300GB of 'system backups' The 600GB can be backed up from 19:00 in the evening and the 300GB of System data (Exchange mailstore ntbackup and SQL agent backup jobs) can only be backed up from 6.00am in the morning after the system backup jobs have complete.

 

We also need to offsite the data daily and also keep a monthly backup which cannot be recycled to the following year.

 

My question is what is the best way to setup Retrospect to acheive this ?

 

I thought about creating a 'daily use' backup tape set, and two backup jobs one that ran at 19:00 and the other at 6.00am the following day. The Friday evening fileserver backup would be a recycle job to clear the snapshots in the backup set to stop the tapes filling up. Monday to Thursday (and Friday for the System backups) would be a normal backup to make use of Retrospects Progressive backup capability.

 

I would then use the transfer snapshot option to copy the most active snapshot in the 'daily use' backup set to another backup set which could be offsited. There would be 20 of these sets, wk1-mon - wk4-fri plus monthly archives jan to dec

 

Is there a way to ensure that the snapshot transfer only transfers files that have not been backed up to the destination backup set previously, but at the same time maintaining only one snapshot in the backup set? i.e. I want the most recent snapshot and files only to be transferred to the destination backup set and at the same time I want to utilise the progressive backup feature so I don't have to rewrite every file to the media.

 

Also is there a way to get retrospect to transfer the snapshot to any backup set which is in the library at the time the job is run ? I can see how to set the source (daily use set) and also how to include all the possible backup sets in the destination, however the schedule option requires you to select a backup set when you select multiple possible backup sets to use. I want it to use any of the possible sets I have specified. Is there anyway around this ?

 

Is this the best stategy for the requirement or is there another way to acheive this ?

 

Regards

 

Richard.