Sure!   Investigate backing up to a disk appliance.  There are a number 
of vendors ... Data Domain might be a good place to start, as they have 
much of the market.

Since you do nightly full backups, they'll love you and you'll be 
impressed at what you can squeeze onto their disk (will vary with your 
data and each vendor).  

This isn't a no-cost solution, but I expect you will love the resulting 
system. *No* tape handling on backups or restores ... what will you do 
with all your spare time? ;-)

If you are considering "differentials", consider "cumulative 
incrementals" first.  More data is backed up, but restores may be 
faster.  Also, with either type of incremental backup, how much you can 
fit on a tape depends on your data.  If a few small files change ... 
little tape; if a few huge files change ... maybe an incremental is 
close to a "full"!

cheers, wayne (who knows a bit about NetBackup, but doesn't even know 
how to spell BackupExec, let alone whether it can backup to disk).

Bockert, Patrick wrote, in part,  on 2008-01-03 2:22 PM:
  

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?

    

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   Steven L. Sesar
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   UNIX Application Services R101
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