I'm not really clear if you have a central BE server or each server backs 
itself up to local tape from this, but if you don't have a single media server 
I would strongly suggest that that be an important part of your strategy.  If 
your are talking 14 SDLT tape total for your whole environment, you may find a 
de-dupe appliance a bit steep for your taste.  If it's for each server, then 
that many appliances is going to drain your budget.

I'm a big fan of de-dupe myself, but if you really need to do this at minimum 
investment, you might look at a simple RAID array for your backups- BE lets you 
put the data on disk, then dupe to tape later.  Not as clean a solution as 
Netbackup, but it does work.  You can run your backups at night to disk, then 
dupe to tape during the day when someone is around to swap the tapes.

Retention on disk can be set shorter than tape, so you don't need more than 
about 4 days' worth of disk space (cover long weekends, holidays).

Heck- if you have enough open drive bays in your media server, all you need is 
disk.  Not as elegant as de-dupe, but it'll get the job done- and restores from 
disk are usually MUCH faster than from tape.

De-dupe is the "right" answer, but if you can't get there yet- this is a good 
place to start.

Tom


Bockert, Patrick wrote:
> Greetings,  
> I'm looking for assistance in creating a new backup strategy for a number of 
> servers that are currently being backed up nightly with a full backup. Until 
> now the backups were running fine, but the problem is that the backup's are 
> now requiring a second tape to complete and over the weekend there is no one 
> available to swap tapes. 
> Our current retention of the daily tape is 30 days and the monthly are kept 
> for a year. My first inclination is to schedule a weekly full with 
> differentials for the remainder of the week. Instead of 14 tapes per week, I 
> could maybe get by with 3. The full backup would still require 2 tapes but if 
> the differentials could be appended to the same tape I could maybe leave the 
> tape in for the rest of the week. Then start the rotation with another set of 
> 3 tapes with four sets in all. 
> Specifically I'm utilizing Veritas BackupExec to backup HP Proliant servers 
> to super DLT Tape.   
> I'm looking for a simple solution that may result in less time and tapes to 
> implement.   
> Does anyone have a suggestion?  
> Regards, 
> Patrick Bockert


+----------------------------------------------------------------------
|This was sent by tburrell_mn AT yahoo DOT com via Backup Central.
|Forward SPAM to abuse AT backupcentral DOT com.
+----------------------------------------------------------------------


_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist  -  Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu