On Feb 24, 2010, at 1:05 PM, jeremyt wrote:

> Hello--
> 
> I have some questions about best practices for offsite rotation.  I'm not new 
> to Networker but setting up and defining an offsite rotation is new to me.  
> Every other place I've worked at its always been defined, in place and a had 
> published routine to follow.
> 
> In my environment I have a VTL (EMC DL3D) with a large PTL (iScalar).  I have 
> my groups, pools and auto clone jobs (to the PTL) configured at the group 
> level but am unsure on best practices for rotating the tapes out for offsite 
> storage. 
> 
> Every client runs a full backup on one night of the week with incrementals 
> running on the other 6 nights.
> 
> I'm confused about when to rotate to offsite?  Should I just send whatever 
> tapes from the clone pool (all groups clone to the one pool) are full on the 
> regular scheduled weekly pickup basis?  
> 
> Is there a better practice I'm missing or a better way to implement offsite 
> rotation?
> 
> Thanks in advance for any and all advice! 

This depends entirely on your organization's business continuity needs. There 
is no one size fits all answer. Bottom line though is how much data loss can 
your organization sustain in the event of a disaster and how much tape media 
can your employer afford to purchase? These are questions you need to discuss 
with your management.

We do not clone because cloning takes too long and we only have four tape 
drives in our physical tape library. Right now, every byte that gets written to 
tape is sent off site the next day. We too do a full backup once a week, but we 
do level 1 differentials the other days so that in the event of a DR situation, 
we only have two days worth of tapes to restore from. This costs us more in 
tape media, but not that much more then doing six days worth of incremental 
backups. 

We expect to start backing up our data to an Avamar grid soon. When that 
happens, a handy dandy script I wrote will be put into production which will 
trigger a tape backup first, then an Avamar backup when the tape backup 
finishes. The physical tapes will be sent off site, just like they are now, but 
any ad hoc file restores will come off our Avamar grid. I hope to have this 
system in place within the next two months or so.

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