Backup Solutions on Windows 2000 network.

[PGRAYSON]

Our current system consists of Veritas backing up to 2 seperated DAT drives overnight, giving us about 48 GB of backups daily. This is adequate for our current data and exchange server.

However due to the imminent installation of new systems, this isn't going to be enough for the forseeable future, as we can forsee the need to backup up to 200MB daily during the next couple of years.

Would backing up to another server during the night, and using that machine to backup be a more feasable solution? Would performing incrementals daily plus one weekly backup be better? How easy are incrementals to restore, as I got serverely burnt with incrementals on another OS in the past, and the time saved during the backup was offset by the extended time taken to perform the restore?

What media is the best? We currently use DDS-3. Are Ultra LTO and SDLT more cost efficient for such large backups?

 

[Jpoandl]

Differential or Incremental backup work fine. You just need to make sure that you are familiar with the restore process. Arcserve and Veritas has very easy wizards that will prompt you for the TAPES required for the restore. So, you shouldn't have a problem restoring the data.

As always, the best policy is to test your restores every so often. This way, you will be confident on how to perform the restore. But, again, Incrementals or Differential backups are very common.

As your data grows, you will start to run into a time contraint anyway. Although, the amount of data you are backing up is relatively small, you could find that FULL backups to more time that your nightly window gives you. So using incremental or differentials are really that best way to save time.

Anyway here is a good web site that will recommend that proper tape media for you. It is a wizard:

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/ebs/ebstoolsbackupsizing.html

Joseph L. Poandl
MCSE 2003

If your company is in need of experts to examine technical problems/solutions, please check out

http://www.NJCOMPUTERNETWORKS.com

(Sales@njcomputernetworks.com)

 

[PGRAYSON]

Thanks.