Should I Consolidate?

[JG5]

Hello everyone,

I'm running Networker 7.1 on WS2K3. I have a W2K file and print server client with a ~300 gig volume that takes anywhere from 13 hours on a good night to over 16 hours for a full backup. Since this obviously runs into production during the week I have been performing incrementals Monday through Thursday and then a full on Friday. I let the full on Friday run until it completes. I've been monitoring the changes for a while and on average, only about 10 to 11 gigs change on a daily basis (based on the incremental backups). Should I run incrementals during the week, and then consolidate on Saturday? How and where would this be most resource intensive. I'm backing up to an AIT-3 library with 120 slots and 4 drives. I'm hoping someone can point me down the right path. I'm eating a lot of media each week currently.

Thanks.

 

[605]

Consolidating is a 2-step issue:
- it creates a level 1 backup
- it APPENDS the data to the last full, creating a "pseudo-full" with the level full

It only makes sense when the amount of changed data is small compared to a full backup.

It does not replace true full backups.

 

[JG5]

I think I'll just hold out a for a few more weeks. We are migrating to Commvault anyway. Thanks for the response.