Starting Over

[publishingscotland]

Hello,

 

I've recently taken responsibility for our small office's backup. We've been using Retrospect 6.1 on our mac office for years and although we've probably only got about 40-50Gb of data (there are 6 of us), we've now got about 45 AIT-1 35Gb tapes.

 

Clearly our backup strategy is getting wasteful. We currently have 5 backup sets (Monday, Tuesday..., Friday). Monday to Thurs are 'Normal' and Friday is 'Recycle'.

 

We can't keep buying more tapes, so I am proposing a more complex strategy:

 

Week 1: Mon Recycle, Tues-Fri Normal

Week 2: Mon Normal, Tues Recycle, Wed-Fri Normal

Week 3: Mon-Tues Normal, Wed Recycle, Thurs-Fri Normal

Week 4: Mon-Wed Normal, Thurs-Fri Recycle

 

Or am I completely over-complicating something which should be quite simple?

 

There's no need for us to be able to recover really old deleted files, although I worry that 1 week is too short a period; monthly would be more comfortable.

 

I've never been responsible for backup strategy before...

 

Thanks,

 

liam