Re Backup Space

[Aron Seed]

We backup 5 servers daily with a grand total of ~120GB worth of >data being backed up today and ~250GB backup requirement in the >next 3 months.

We have a DELL PV112T (DLTVS160 80/160GB) tape drive today on the >VBE V9.1 media server but it's not enough capacity to do full >backups on a daily basis of all 5 servers.

I would rather not resort to 1 full backup at the beginning of >the week + incrementals the other days of the week as it's a pain >to restore from tape. Spanning 2 tapes when doing full backups is >a pain too as our admin has to put the 2nd tape in around 8:00 AM >each morning which means open files while the backup is finishing.

Backup-to-Disk folders I suppose is an option as long as there is >some way to recycle the BDF disk space when full (for example, I >provide 1TB BDF space so when full it starts overwriting the >oldest backup sets).

Based on these requirements, what's the best option for us?

Try to take incremental backups on the weekdays. This will make the
restore somewhat more difficult.

Aron

 

[Joe Rom King]

Joe

You may use the 1TB of central backup storage, or simply buy five 100GB
external disks, and connect them (USB2.0) near every server. Then
install Relative Rev Backup (http://www.datamills.com) on each of these
servers, and set it up to take a daily backup, retaining some five
dailies and say five weeklies.

Relative Rev Backup adds only the incremental change form one backup to
the other (including on weeklies and monthlies), so if your original
files consume some 50GB, 100GB backup disk should be big enough to
probably retain more than six months of backup history.

Although With Relative Rev Backup works in "incremental forever"
fashion, you can recover form any backup version as if it is done from
a full backup.

Joe Rom King