stupid beginner backup questions

[mrmoneymatters]

I don't know anything about Veritas except I installed it last night. I need some basic help to get me going in the right direction. I am to perform full backups every night with a 4 week rotation. Should I create a media set for each week such as week1, week2 etc..? What restrictions should I place on those media sets, like days before overwrite? Please help me if I am doing this the wrong way.

TIA

Network Admin
A+, Network+, MCSA 2000, MCSE 2000

 

[elmurado]

AFAIK, creating a media set means that with a four week rotation you would be able to store each week offsite and then it would be A,B,C,D to mean the media sets. Then on week5 you would have media set A returned to be able to use it and start the cycle again.
Now if you want to make sure that the media set does not get wiped(ie if you accidentally put a tape in on the wrong week/day) then you can set the days before overwrite or if you want to keep the tape permanently then you would put never overwrite.
verifying is also an important procedure as well as testing that the backups are actually working. You may think it's working fine and then, one day when you really need it for a disaster you try and restore and find that there's nothing on the tapes. what do you do? Test the tapes and make sure that you can restore the data whenever you need to. Just pick some files at random if nothing else and restore to an empty, newly created folder on the same machine if you don't have an identical test machine and then compare the files with the originals.

Check this site out for a good rundown on backups:

http://www.taobackup.com

 

[mrmoneymatters]

Thanks for your help. I do have another question though.

Can I create a media set called daily and place all media in that set. Then I could set the overwrite protection to 26 days. I will have a total of 20 tapes for M-F daily full backups. These tapes are taken off site every day. Would that be ok?

Network Admin
A+, Network+, MCSA 2000, MCSE 2000

 

[elmurado]

If you set the overwrite protection to 26 days then how would you get tape 1 to be overwritten when you get back to it on day 21?
The reason(at least one of them) for having the ability to overwrite is so that you can save money and not require 365 tapes for each day of the year. That way, you reuse tapes more than once; most modern ones can handle a fair bit of wiping/writing.(HP Dats are supposed to take it to the 100 mark).
The way we do it is we take a full monthly each month. This is a permanent tape, held offsite, which does not get overwritten. So for every year there are twelve tapes.
Then we have a four week weekly rotation offsite which are overwritten every four weeks. Then we have a daily four tape rotation from Mon-Thursday. all my backups are full--I'm paranoid I guess and can afford the time.
This means on any given day we have a weekly/daily and monthly held off site from the most recent backups. The dailys come back to office everyday(me) and the weeklys are held at secure custom built storage facility(Nuke proof etc).

I'd say the way to look at it is to think like this:
1.If server dies I go to
1.1 Yesterday's tape, if yesterday's tape is no good I go to
1.2 The day before...
1.3 Or go to the week before
1.4 or go to the month before....

You could have all the tapes in a single media set--it's just that then you have to label them correctly as they won't be differentiated setwise within the app. But you could still identify them uniquely. All depends.

 

[mrmoneymatters]

That makes sense. Thanks for the info.

One more question, how come you keep this data for so long? Is this just user data? How long would you keep a backup of ad?

Network Admin
A+, Network+, MCSA 2000, MCSE 2000

 

[elmurado]

We have a lot legal doc's which could possibly need to be kept for 10 years so having an extra copy is handy in case. Archiving is a huge job though.System States and things like AD depends on how often you change things or whether you feel you may need to ever revert back to a previous state.