No downside if you can afford the media for 35 days of fulls, and the
backups are getting done on time.
We moved to a weekly full and a twice daily log offload(incremental) on
our 5 Exchange servers and it works well for us.
One gotcha - if you want to do incrementals, the exchange servers have
to have circular logging disabled.

-----Original Message-----
From: Rushforth, Tim [mailto:TRushforth AT WINNIPEG DOT CA] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2004 11:36 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Exchange Incremental Backup


We are using Data Protection for Exchange 5.2.1.0 to backup Exchange
2000.



We currently do nightly Full backups and have the TSM policy with Retain
Extra Versions = Retain Only Versions = 35.



We are looking into doing incremental backups throughout the day to
provide for better protection.  We currently have transaction logs and
the Exchange DB on separate physical disks both RAID10.  We would need a
lot of drives to fail to lose any data here - but we are also looking at
recovering from some type of logical corruption where both the logs and
the DB are corrupt so we would have to resort to the last backup.



We really don't want or need to keep the incrementals that are done
throughout the day for more than a couple of days.



It seems the way to do this would be to change Retain Only to say 2 days
but leave Retain Extra at 35.  This way full backups would be kept for
35 days but incrementals would only be kept for 2 days.



Does this make any sense?



Is there any other way to do what we are trying to do?



Are there downsides to this besides that any incremental that we do is
no good after 2 days?



Thanks for any input.



Tim Rushforth

City of Winnipeg