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rogerdu
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Weekly Backup

Post by rogerdu »

I'm looking to produce a weekly full backup that I can store on a USB device to provide an offsite copy of my most important production backups. What I've been asked to research is how this can be done.

While I've looked through the GUI and manuals, I didn't see anything that "jumped" out at me. Specifically, what I am trying to do is setup a weekly rotation of a full image. Here's the caveat, our current backup scheme does a monthly full (synthetic) at the beginning of the month and incrementals for the rest of the month.

Is this a matter of defining a storage location on a USB based drive, have a separate backup definition run (say on Thursday night) to this location on a weekly basis, then have the device taken offsite Friday until the following Thursday... (it is approximately 800GB on a full image if this was fully backed up without dedup, compression etc.) for financial data (SQL) which can be exported for application consistency, Exchange and the office intellectual property (mostly word docs)

Thoughts?

Roger
Shestakov
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Re: Weekly Backup

Post by Shestakov »

Hello Roger,

Could you specify your plan a bit, please?
Do you need to make weekly active full backups on Friday + daily increments (Sat-Thu) and you wish to rotate drives weekly?

By the way, have you considered an opportunity to backupcopy existing backup files?
Thanks!
rogerdu
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Re: Weekly Backup

Post by rogerdu »

I would use a backup copy if it could produce a weekly full that is independent of the source, but from what I've read, this is not the case.

My current backups (all onsite):
22 restore points (so realistically, 1 month in the current chain)
Monthly Full backup (1st weekend of the month)
Daily incremental backups.

My manager wants to offsite 3 systems (total of ~800 GB of data):
- Financial data (which includes config files and a proprietary dump of the data from SQL)
- Exchange
- MS Office files

The offsite is to happen once a week and the suggestion from him is to use a USB device that is easily portable.

is this a bit clearer?
Shestakov
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Re: Weekly Backup

Post by Shestakov »

Thanks for the clarification!
rogerdu wrote:I would use a backup copy if it could produce a weekly full that is independent of the source, but from what I've read, this is not the case.
It can`t produce backups, but it can wisely copy them with WAN acceleration, produce its own chain etc.
rogerdu wrote:My manager wants to offsite 3 systems (total of ~800 GB of data):
- Financial data (which includes config files and a proprietary dump of the data from SQL)
- Exchange
- MS Office files
2 more things are not clear:
- Do you have that data backed up separately from other VMs or you have more VMs in the backup job?
- Does your manager want you to move Full backups offsite or increments are also fine?

The plan seems to be:
Switch your backup job to run Active full once a week
Create backup copy job with GFS retention to copy weekly backups offsite
rogerdu
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Re: Weekly Backup

Post by rogerdu »

2 more things are not clear:
- Do you have that data backed up separately from other VMs or you have more VMs in the backup job?
- Does your manager want you to move Full backups offsite or increments are also fine?
- I currently have all Windows systems in one job.
- His thought is to have full backups of the systems. My thought is to have this as an independent activity from the regular backups.

Roger
Shestakov
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Re: Weekly Backup

Post by Shestakov »

rogerdu wrote:- I currently have all Windows systems in one job.
- His thought is to have full backups of the systems. My thought is to have this as an independent activity from the regular backups.
So you can either go for the plan described in my previous post or just create another backup job with only needed source vms and make it run only active fulls once a week.
If you choose the 2nd option, depending on your source repository and bandwidth capacity you can either backup onsite + create backup copy job to save traffic or just backup to the offsite repository.
Thanks!
rogerdu
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Re: Weekly Backup

Post by rogerdu »

As we don't have the space (yet... legacy backup product needs to go away!!), I don't have the room to do a weekly full backup. Once that happens, I will gladly do so... that's more in line with "Best Practices" anyways...

Thanks for the feedback! it helps immensely!
Shestakov
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Re: Weekly Backup

Post by Shestakov »

If you are short in space, I would suggest running backup copy job once a week to have Full + weekly increments.
But if your managers wants fulls only, but you can`t afford it, try to set aggressive compression/deduplication. But the best solution is probably to upgrade the repository.
Thanks!
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