Agree. IMO simple for small to medium sized solutions is cumulative
incremental backups daily and full backups at weekends and at month end
with an offsite daily if required. This then defines sensibly you should
have 4 different retentions..

dailys 1 to 2 weeks retention. Reason: whats the point in keeping the
same data filling up tapes when you have just written it to a full
backup. Any requirement for individual day restores after this time then
agreed different approach is required.

weekly 1-2 months retention. Reason whats the point in having many
weeklys when you have taken a monthly full backup.

monthly 6 months: Reason: backup runs once every 4 weeks say so doesnt
use many tapes over the year thus leaving you to have a longer retention
for your data. Anything wanted to be kept over 6 months should be
defined separately.

offsite 2 weeks     Reason: no point having out of date offsite backups
in event of DR you want the latest info.


That to me is simple :)

D


Wayne T Smith wrote:
> KISS = Keep It Simple, Stupid!
>
> It's easy to over-manage NetBackup, because it lets you.  I recommend
> that you keep things simple, and deviate from the simple when it's
> evident that you should.
>
> If the NetBackup pool contains all of your assigned tapes and the
> Scratch pool contains all of your available tapes, life is simple. 
> How many tapes are in use? Count the number of tapes in NetBackup. 
> How many tapes are available for backups? Count the number of tapes in
> Scratch.  All free tapes are available for the next backup.
>
> Cleaning tapes, if any, will be in pool NONE.  I use another pool for
> "suspect" tapes ... tapes that have had "an event" such as a read or
> write error.  If on v6.0, you probably have pool for catalog backups. 
> If you duplicate/vault tapes, you probably have another couple of
> pools (one for catalog backups; one for data) for your catalog and
> image copies.
>
> Why make more pools?  One reason might be to insulate free tapes in a
> pool from others.  For example, in my shop our Oracle Agent backups
> take precedence over file system backups.  We don't want independent
> file system backups "filling" a tape pool, possibly delaying backups
> and causing our archive redo log spaces to fill.  I'm sure there are
> other reasons for more pools, but in general, I recommend: KISS. :-)
>
> cheers, wayne
>
> Wilkinson, Alex wrote, in part,  on 4/25/2006 8:46 PM:
>> What is "best practice" with regards to Volume Pools ?
>>
>> We are thinking of using a single Volume Pool for all of our data tapes.
>> Is it good practice to use the "Netbackup" Volume pool for this
>> situation ?
>>   
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