Full + Incremental backups

mclawler

Active Newcomer
Joined
Nov 19, 2010
Messages
24
Reaction score
0
Points
0
PREDATAR Control23

When we first put TSM in we were doing all full backups of exchange (2007) every night...as you can guess this takes forever.

Now I'm looking to change to a full + incremental methodoligy and I'm not fully sure how.

Currently I've got 4 nodes for each Exchange server

<Node>_Daily, <Node>_Weekly, <Node>_Monthly and <Node>_Yearly.

If I setup the Daily to take an incremental backup and only keep it for 7 days, and setup the weekly to take a full backup on Sundays, when I go to launch the TDP for restores how would it see this?

I've got 4 icons for the TDP, one for each DSM.opt file, if I launch the Daily TDP i'm only going to see incrementals, if I launch the weekly TDP i'm only going to see weekly fulls (etc etc)

What I'd really like is to have 1 node, with 4 different retention policies depending on when the data was backed up....

So

Daily - Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thrusday, Friday, Saturday (INCR) - Kept for 1 week
Weekly - Sunday - second, third, forth and fifth week of the month (FULL) - Kept for 1 month
Monthly - Sunday - First week of the month, Feb thru Dec (Full) - Kept for 3 years
Yearly - Sunday - First week of the month, January only (Full).... - Kept forever
 
PREDATAR Control23

You current solution seems very complex, you may want to consider simplifying it by:
- Run a Full backup on Sunday and M/T/W/T/F/S incremental, set a one month retention policy.
- Run an archive once a month and set a retention policy of 3 years
- Run an archive once a year for "keep forever"

I would also reconsider the value of a monthly and yearly archives, we moved away from that as the chances of retrieving a particular email in a monthly archive are very slim especially if you have tight storage limits.
 
PREDATAR Control23

You current solution seems very complex, you may want to consider simplifying it by:
- Run a Full backup on Sunday and M/T/W/T/F/S incremental, set a one month retention policy.
- Run an archive once a month and set a retention policy of 3 years
- Run an archive once a year for "keep forever"

I would also reconsider the value of a monthly and yearly archives, we moved away from that as the chances of retrieving a particular email in a monthly archive are very slim especially if you have tight storage limits.

My problem comes in with my corporate stated retention policy, so the complexity is pretty much the way it's going to stay.

As far as Archiveing the data, how does that play with capacity licenses? if I archive the data will it get it out of my primary pool so I'm not getting hit against my licenses...right now with running all full's it's killing my capacity licensing (the main reason I'm moving to full + incremental).
 
PREDATAR Control23

What I'd really like is to have 1 node, with 4 different retention policies depending on when the data was backed up....

So

Daily - Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thrusday, Friday, Saturday (INCR) - Kept for 1 week
Weekly - Sunday - second, third, forth and fifth week of the month (FULL) - Kept for 1 month
Monthly - Sunday - First week of the month, Feb thru Dec (Full) - Kept for 3 years
Yearly - Sunday - First week of the month, January only (Full).... - Kept forever

You cannot have 4 different retention policies depending on when the data (same object) was backed up using 1 node. But I am pretty sure you can have 4 different retention policies depending on how the data was backed up using 1 node, using includes and management classes.

daily INCR - use something like "include *incr my_incr_mgmtclass"
weekly FULL - use something like "include *full my_full_weekly_mgmtclass"
monthly FULL - do a 'copy backup' and use something like "include *copy my_full_monthly_mgmtclass"
yearly FULL - do a 'database copy backup' and use something like "include *dbcopy my_full_yearly_mgmtclass"

warning: I am not sure of how TSM tags the 'copy backup' and 'database copy backup'. Check before implementing.

There is no 'archive' with TDP Exchange. Unless you do a backup to disk and then archive the backup file.
The options to get out your data from TSM primary pool is not using TSM or doing backupsets. However backupsets is not supported for TDP backups.

Question: are you currently licensed per TB?? not PVUs? Can you share the experience in a new post (licensing sub-forum)?
 
Last edited:
PREDATAR Control23

You cannot have 4 different retention policies depending on when the data (same object) was backed up using 1 node. But I am pretty sure you can have 4 different retention policies depending on how the data was backed up using 1 node, using includes and management classes.

daily INCR - use something like "include *incr my_incr_mgmtclass"
weekly FULL - use something like "include *full my_full_weekly_mgmtclass"
monthly FULL - do a 'copy backup' and use something like "include *copy my_full_monthly_mgmtclass"
yearly FULL - do a 'database copy backup' and use something like "include *dbcopy my_full_yearly_mgmtclass"

warning: I am not sure of how TSM tags the 'copy backup' and 'database copy backup'. Check before implementing.

There is no 'archive' with TDP Exchange. Unless you do a backup to disk and then archive the backup file.
The options to get out your data from TSM primary pool is not using TSM or doing backupsets. However backupsets is not supported for TDP backups.

Question: are you currently licensed per TB?? not PVUs? Can you share the experience in a new post (licensing sub-forum)?

Rore, I'm assuming this would need to be done via a cmd file, or possily 4 cmd files, yes?
 
PREDATAR Control23

Rore, I'm assuming this would need to be done via a cmd file, or possily 4 cmd files, yes?

It might be possible to do it without a cmd file but it would be a complex and very long one line batch code.
One cmd file can do the trick if you write the logic to determine the date/week etc and launch the correct command accordingly.
 
PREDATAR Control23

OK, next question in my Full + Incremental saga....

How long between Full's do most people do? With being on a capacity license I'd kind of like to push it out as long as reasonable to be safe. Is a monthly full with daily incrementals a crazy idea, should I be doing weekly full's instead?

any thoughts world?
 
PREDATAR Control23

Unfortunately this question really comes down to you own shop.

If you do monthly fulls and daily incrementals... you can save on capacity costs... however in the event of a restore you'll need to restore the monthly full then potentially 30 incrementals. That could take a very long time.

So what is the value of the exchange server in your environment and how big of an insurance policy do you want to take out on it?

How long does a full restore take?
How long does a incremental take?

Figure out the potential downtime required in a emergency situation, write up a couple of possibilities and present it to the business.
Let the business decide, this way if they decide to costs and take the longer outage and they are in your office asking how much longer... you can pull out the sign-off of the policy and let them know this is what they decided.
 
Top