Monthly Backup to Tape

[Drex]

Here's my scenario:

We are currently running backups nightly to a disk storage pool. Our client wants to get a full backup of all nodes to tape once a month. What's the best approach to accomplishing this? Export node? Backupsets?

Thanks in advance.

[DanneFr]

Hi,

we are doing export node backupactive.
I guess it's doing the job..

Regards,
Dan

[chad_small]

Why do they want it? What's the requirement that demands a monthly? Sometimes you have to tell customers NO! When we had to do monthlies we did monthly incrementals using a specially registered monthly node.

Example: SERVER01-MONTHLY.

[vvragav]

Creating different node is one way. My client need the monthly backups not to be combined with daily and they need separate storage. So we created different nodes, management classes and storage pools and perform the backup with different dsm.opt files.

[travelsick]

I agree with Chris. Sometimes customers don't even know what their asking for. A "full backup" is inefficient when you already have incrementals nightly. Why backup the same data you already have? An export to tape of the existing active data would be sufficient b/c when a lot of customers say "full", they will just mean the active files. If they actually want all active and inactive, then it's a copy of your entire storage pools (minus archive data), and that's being done daily anyway, isn't it? You are doing a backup stg of all your primary storage poos to copy pools (probably on tape), right?

I think you're best action here is to communicate with the customer and find out exactly what they mean when they say "full backup monthly" and to what end. Why do they need this, and how is your current nightly backup and copy pool not sufficient. They probably have no idea what you're actually doing behind the scenes.