Backup Strategy - advice

[wysard]

Ok, so here's my current strategy;

 

Proactives for a month

Recycle all Proactives ~beginning of month

Regular Backup of everyone beginning of month, before Recycle, separate store

 

Now, I have some questions;

 

1- As I understand, the Recycles will trash the catalog files of the Proactive stores, and apply a new, defined backup to these stores. That's fine, if that's the case. However, how will the Proactives, going into the same store, react to this? Will they increment what's already there, or start a whole new Proactive sequence to the same stores? (not sure I can word that better)

 

2- The Regular monthly backup seems to have missed some people who weren't in the office. Will it continue to try until everyone in it's defined targets are sought and backed up, or will it just try again next month, incrementing who it already has, and adding those it missed?

 

I've been trying to throw together a strategy for our situation. We've got RS Server, and are using that to backup all the Windows workstations. We'd like to keep a monthly store of everyone, as a "just in case", and use Proactive to grab everyone's stuff daily. That's what I /think/ I've done above - please correct me if I'm wrong.

 

Now the bad.

 

After all this, I have to relinquish a managably-sized monthly to our unix admins, who want to use Omniback to back /that/ up to tape, rather than giving me access to the tape drives, and letting me do the incremental thing... if this sounds weird, believe me, I have no control over the situation.

 

Can someone help with some advice? I'm trying my best, but I don't think the software was built for what my coworkers are looking for - and yet I need to give them some sort of solution, since the alternative would be to allow Windows to not be controlled by linux.

 

Please help. I'll be happy to clarify anything should this not be a sufficient explanation.

[natew]

Hi

 

The type of script really isn't that important. What matters is what is in your backup sets. A recycle backup empties the set, that means every source you backup will be backed up in full the first time around. after that the backups will be incremental.

 

How much storage space do you have for your backups? One thing you could do is run your recycles on a staggered schedule. That will get you the 1 month cushion you are looking for. See the attached doc for details.

 

If you are using proactive backup scripts it will try to backup everyone in the script based on the schedule you have outlined. It will keep trying no matter how often it fails.

 

Nate

 

 

[wysard]

Ah, I think I see what you mean. Anything going into a backup set, regardless of script type, is going to increment a previous backup/incremental of a like-named system (or from the same RS client)? Is that accurate?

 

We have about 1T on the backup server for now, which is plenty for the amount of people we have (~40 workstations).

 

Yours is a better idea, insofar as not everyone's here on Full Backup Day, so the proactive would catch them - say in the first week of the month - and we could use that as the backup pile for the unix folk.

 

Thanks once again, Nate!

[natew]

Hi

 

That is correct. What really matters is what is on the volumes being backed up and the contents of the destination backup set. Retrospect compares those two items and then decides which files actually need to get backed up.

 

The script just tells Retrospect which volume/backup set combination to use.

 

Nate