FastBack for MS Exchange - Daily/Monthly backups?

[mclawler]

I'm just starting to play with Fastback for Exchange (or fastback in general for that matter).

I've got a FastBack server up and running and attached to our test exchange server and have been very pleased with the test results so far.

What I'm curious about, is can I do Daily/Weekly/Monthly backups with FastBack and keep them for long term storage? We have some pretty large retention policies for our data (outlined below) and I'd like to be able to do all of this for Exchange with FastBack (due to the ease of restore).

Daily - Kept for 7 days (Monday - THrusday)
Weekly - Kept for 28 days (taken of Friday)
Monthly - Kept for 1 year (Taken on the 1st of the month)
Yearly - kept forever - I'd do this one with a TSM for Exchange job...

I'm wondering if I can use FB to do these backups...
Daily - Incremental backups - don't get rid of logs
Weekly- Full backup - get rid of logs
Monthly - full backup - get rid of logs
Yearly - TSM full backup

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I'm pretty sure I can't store all of this data on my TSM server, and I haven't started to explore the DR settings yet (no DR Hub, would like to use TSM as my DR system).

Anyone know how this might work, or should I stick to Daily backups via FB and Monthly backups via TSM (we're not doing weeklies now, just 30 days of Daily backups).

Your thoughts Ladies and Gentlemen?

[elbutre]

setup 3 different policies and job schedules for the same client group (exchange backups) i do this for CDP and normal backups.

1 job schedule to run once per day and set the policy with retention value of 7
1 job schedule to run once per week and set policy retention value to 4 or 5
1 job schedule to run once per month and set poicy retention value to 12

it is not very efficient in terms of backups space used but it will work

i have 2 job schedules, 1 for CDP that runs every 1 hour and i keep for 24 hours and 1 for daily backups that i keep for 3 months (that is our backup policy)

i have also split our exchange server backups in 2 client groups 1) for system and applications and 2) for exchange data base and log files (whcih are on 2 separate drives. as i really do not need the system and applications to be backed up as part of the CDP backup.

hope this helps

[mclawler]

Thanks Elbutre, thats exactly what I started looking towards doing...now to figure out if I need to spread out my exchange backups....it's telling me that I have 82 snaps scheduled at once and the recommended is 3....unfortunatly we have our exchange setup so that each storage group is on it's own mount point....gonna make for a mess on that first backup!

Question, how often do you run a full snap vs an incremental snap?

[elbutre]

i think you need to stage the first backup with 82 volumes, for the first backup i increased the count from 3 to 5 full backups allowed at and once all full backups had run i reverted back to 3.

i would schedule your full backups to start on different days or hours of the day depending on how large your backups are and how long they take, my exchange information store is 80gb and it took about 2 or 3 hours for the first full backup. just take a bunch of volumes at hour zero and wait for it complete and run the 2nd lot etc etc. till you get to 82 volumes


only my first backup is a full backup and all further ones are incremental, there is no need to run full snapshots after the initial one unless your backups have corrupted and the fastback server informs you to run a full backup.

anyway that is my take on it.

[mclawler]

We try to keep our storage groups to 100gb or smaller, creating a new one when they get to that size....currently we're sitting at about 2.5tb of exchange data (which is why I want to take as few full backups as possible).

Now quick question, and I'm sorry for all of these questions, you have 3 schedules....does that mean that you had to take 3 full backups?

First full for daily
first full for weekly
first full for monthly?

Or is the system smart enough to know that its the same data? I'm guessing it's not and I'll need to space these out a bit better....

[elbutre]

yes 3 full backups, as they are different chain of backups. perhaps if you run deduplication you can save some space but personally i don't trust de duplication