From Full to Incremental backups... 2

[lebisol]

Hello gang,
As the time goes on so as the need to give up those full backups....backup time is way to loong.
Being that I have not had to mess with Incremental backups excuse my navie questions. Here it comes:
What is incremental backup based of...the content of the tape or the job itself?
Lets say I run:
[JOB1] Sun. - Full backup (Sun Bkp Set/Tape1)
[JOB2] Mon. - Incremental backup ( Mon Bkp Set/Tape1)

Will the monday backup job just backup the differences from sunday or do I need to run a full backup on each tape 1st and then after edit the jobs into incremental?
Goal is to have a weekend full while weekdays incrementals...

Many thanks for your time!

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[lebisol]

[yrs have gone by and TT still has no edit feture]

In other words is my job considered 'incremental' from the last time it ran?
...if it runs 1 time every Mon. will it re-backup 7 days worth?

Thanks again.

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[LawnBoy]

An incremental is the difference between now and the last backup performed, whether that backup was a full, a differential, or an incremental. So if you ran a full on Monday and an inc on Tues, Tues backup will have the difference between Mon and Tues. If you ran another inc on Wed, it would contain the difference between Tues and Wed.

In order to restore this data to Wed, you would need to restore the Full, the Tues inc, and the Wed inc.

I prefer having a full backup as the first set on every tape, but you don't have to. Incrementals are based on the last job run, not what's already on the tape (some people use one tape for fulls and another tape for inc's). I find it much less confusing to have everything I need on a single tape. The more tapes involved in a backup set the greater your chances of restore failures...

I have 1 single job that does a full on Wed and inc's every other day. Set up a weekly scheme and you can pick what happens on what day. You won't have to edit the job every time a full runs.

hth.

 

[lebisol]

Thanks LawnBoy for clerifying it all.
Yes I was hoping to get the same concept because my incrementals on file servers should not be that big After the full bkp has been made and it seems like a waste of tapes...
Thanks for your attention to this thread!
All the best!




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[Zelandakh]

LawnBoy describes it well.

My problem with incrementals and differentials is that if the full backup has a problem then you are in big trouble.

I prefer full backups each and every night. Yes it is expensive and time consuming, but my data is "the company". If it goes, the company goes.

Admittedly with closing on 5TB of live data being backed up each night that does mean a fair price is paid to keep that data going!

 

[lebisol]

Hello Zelandakh and thanks for joining in.
If I have not thank you enough throuhg other forums then here is another public Thank You! ;-)
I have been contemplating this switch for some time now.
The problems I am runing into are that my backups are taking about 12-13 hrs to run and cutting into produciton time slowing down my network resources significantly.
Backups gather up just about 180GB directly to tape and include:
-5 fileservers
-E2K (full with system state and AD - no bricks 18GB)
-SQL2K (2 instances 50GB)
-Terminal server profiles

Being that files are 'in use' because of time overspill a lot files don't get backed up....most people advise to avoid using Open File module.
Other option I considerd was using bkp to disk and then bkp of bkp to the tape. Not sure how much time will I cut down by doing so ...and finding a spare 5days x 200BG = 1T worth of 'free drive space' might be tight without investment. Coming right after the purchse of LTO loader...rough times.
On the other hand, fear of loosing that 1 Full backup doesn't give me warm and fuzzy feeling.
As of now my intent is to be using:
-------------------------
JOB1 - Full weekly bkp SAT.
JOB2 - Incremental MON.
..
JOB6 - Incremental FRI.
-------------------------
Where every 2nd and 3rd weekly bkup will be pulled of site leaving me with 1 week worth bkp sitting in the loader.
Thoughts?

Thanks again for your time!


--------------
since there is no PM in the forum Zelandakh can you email me on lebisol2(AT)hotmail.com not related to this post...

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[Zelandakh]

A third of your data is SQL - consider using a SQL maintenance plan to drop the data to disk before backing up the disk based data then you don't use the SQL agent.

Can you break out the timings of each part so we can see where your bottlenecks are? Which server has the autoloader?

And 180GB in total - why did you get an autoloader?

 

[lebisol]

Hi Zelandakh,
Thanks for the post it definetly made me triple check my setup.
It must have been a late night-edit of my selection list as I noticed that bricks have crawled into it adding an overhaed of almost 5 hrs of backup. In addition one of the users has added his (ehm) mp3 collection on fileserver on one of my mpls/remote branches + 3 1/2 hrs.
All combined added about 8 hrs vasted in backups.
Live and learn.
Either way, thanks guys for the notes on incrementals....I have learned something new.
All the best!

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[lebisol]

Oh and the autoloader was due to expected growth and forgetfull staff...and eventually bad DLT drive.
I am looking into adding 2 more E2k3, Oracle server and 3-4 BDC and file servers in next 6-12months. Hence my worries about bkps being so long in the present.
Thanks!

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[Zelandakh]

So in the selections, remove the brick level backup and do a *.mp3 exclude.

If you are going to add more servers, add more tape drives. Don't rely on one.

2 more Exchange servers? Yikes.

 

[LawnBoy]

most people advise to avoid using Open File module

I'm using it on Netware and Windows and have never had any problems. Backups would be pretty tough without it.

I recommend that you don't use SQL agents; as Zelandakh mentioned let SQL make it's own backups, then copy those to tape with BE. I have lost databases due to SQL agents, it won't happen again. Emergency rebuilds are easier and faster as well, less software to install and configure before you're back online.

 

[hardrockclassic]

Greetings All,

I have a similar problem and would appreciate any light you can shine on it…

I just changed over from a Full to a Differential backup on a 3 year old Dell server with ATA RAID drives. It is running Windows server 2003 std. with Veritas 10.0 and AOFO.

The reason for the change was that the Full backup rook 11 hours to backup 72.1GB.

This is a CPA firm and they are working about 15 hours a day at this time of year so we need to shorten up the backup time.

A successful test run of the Differential completed in 15 minutes, so I scheduled the job to run for this fist time last night.

It backed up 2.3GB… and ran for over 7 hours!

There was one exception reported: Backup- C: C-DRIVE The item C:\System Volume Information\catalog.wci\00010014.ci in use - skipped.

Thanks for your help

 

[lebisol]

Lawnboy,
it came from here:

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/275898.htm

...
..
.

NOTE: If the issue is unresolved after following steps 2 & 3, uninstall and re-install AOFO on the server that is producing the AOFO error. For details please refer to the related technote section below.

Sooo I gave up on it

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[lebisol]

btw my backups are now back to normal
running from: 11pm-3am for 180GB
damn those bricks

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[LawnBoy]

I can't imagine trying to run backups without an OFA. Without one, your backups are incomplete (or you've gone through a whole lot of trouble closing every file, something that is not possible in my environment).

What you posted is not a recommendation not to use AOFO, it says to uninstall and reinstall if the above steps did not work.

Getting your AOFO to work would be well worth the trouble.

 

[lebisol]

...and have done install/uinstall...could not get rid of the error and they had no other suggestions so I abandoned it. My backups were locking up and failing or timing out wihtout ever finishing...all kinds of issues.
Simple rule for users is...restart the machine before going home or I will not backup your files. All other files needed to backup are server side with agents or backups of backups from disk.
So perhaps I am getting lucky for now...given the 2 evils I chose the lesser of the two...no OFA for now.

All the best!



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[LawnBoy]

Hey, whatever works for you...
Forcing the users to reboot would solve most of the problem.

 

[LawnBoy]

Hardrock,

Not sure why your diffs would take so long, probably should start another thread since that's a different problem.

 

[hardrockclassic]

Thanks, Lawnboy. I will start a new thread...