Is staging possibile with Retrospect?

[klantomo]

I am trying to set up a backup strategy with Retrospect's backup-to-disk feature, but somehow it seems to me that the progressive backup concept that Retrospect uses makes staging almost impossible. The problem is that you have to overwrite the backup sets on the hard disk when it runs full using a Recycle backup and you will always have to start a full backup afterwards. Let's say you have enough hard disk capacity to backup all your machines just once. This means that you will have to backup all files of your backup sources on a daily basis and then transfer a backup of all these files daily to your tape library too. This doesn't make sense at all of course because you will have to run full backups daily. I conclude that Retrospect doesn't support staging. Did I oversee anything or can anyone confirm my conclusion?

[Mayoff]

Dantz uses a staging strategy. We backup to hard disk during the week, and schedule a backup set transfer to tape once a week. After data is moved to tape, we do a "recycle" backup.

 

You can do the recycle manually or with a once per week scheduled backup using a standard backup script.

[klantomo]

Thanks for the reply. I think this strategy only works for smaller companies. If you have to backup a large amount of data everyday, your hard disks will be full before a week ends. Besides, I wouldn't feel comfortable with having backups only on hard disk for one week. Hard disks are still too expensive and unreliable to play such a central role in a backup strategy. Therefore, in my view daily backups to tapes is a must.