Monthly differential backup

[DonGiorgio]

Hi! I am using BS 9.0. I have 3,4 TB disk space to which i make backups. I would like to make 14 days or monthly differential or incremental backup. BrightSotrs schemes offer only weekly incremental /differential backups. So, any ideas?
Regards, George

 

[jrgoldstein]

I can only offer what doesn't seem to work for myself in a similar situation. I have a 800 Gbyte storage array that only has a few Gbytes of changes per week. I'm running on Linux using a relatively low capacity DDS-4 autochanger. Ideally I would like to do a full backup once a quarter followed by differential backups.

1) You can schedule a weekly differential/incremental and use the exception view to turn off the full backup for each week going out. The problem is, at least two of the "weekly" days have overwrite turned on. Plus depending on the media rules you use, your first full backup may get tossed into the scratch set pool if you don't manage it carefully.

2) Brighstor seems to depend on its own database record of what files have been backed up rather than rely on the file creation/modification dates, so if Brightstor's record of the full backup goes away (ages off, or the job has to be restarted) then Brightstor may try to backup everything again

3) Regardless of the job cycle table mode (append/overwrite), Brightstor doesn't seem to want to append to tapes, at least in any way that I can predict. I end up with five tapes of 20 Gbyte uncompressed capacity that Brightstor has only written 600 Mybtes onto each of them, and on the sixth day Brightstor wants a different tape loaded.

4)It would be nice if Brightstor had a mode of operation where it just looked at file date stamp. At least then I could back up my system with one job, then run a daily differential relative to a given date. Having an internal database keep track of every file is I'm sure nice for those people who want to go back and find one particular version of a file, but I'm mainly concerned about restoring my system from a massive failure. When that happens, the tape is what's important.

As you can tell in 1-3 above, I'm not terribly impressed with Brightstor Arcserve 9.0 on Linux. I'm assuming the 9.0 windows version has similar problems. I'd go back to using Veritas Backup Exec, but they don't support DDS changers on Linux (I migrated my system from Win2k to Linux a while back.)

Regards,

Jamie

 

[DonGiorgio]

Hi, i think you didn't quite get my question, or i didn't write it ok. My backup device is NAS with 3,4 TB disk space. I use several file system devices to make backups of my servers. The problem is that i would like to have monthly or at least 14 day diff/inc backup, but brightstors schemes are only for a week. Do you know software or a way to do it in brightstore?

regards,
George

 

[jrgoldstein]

Sorry for my mis-understanding. I haven't used backup to disk with Brightstor but assume you've already configured Brightstor to access the disks as backup points. You should be able to control how long the backups are saved via the "min # of media in Save Set" and "Retention Period (days)" setting in the media rules part of the Method/Schedule tab. I'm assuming that Brightstor can store more than one backup session per file system device, but this is just an assumption

You may want to check if your NAS device is supported directly by Brightstor through their NAS Client.

Regards,

Jamie