Real life Backup situation

cert-taker

Hi, I need help from all of you regarding backup. For my company, I am doing this:

Saturday - Normal (Full) backup , named as Week1bckup, Week2bckup, Week3bckup and Week4bckup recursively.

Sunday - Friday - Incremental backup, named as dailybckup

My questions are:

1. For the incremental backup, I select the option "Append to the same file". So at the end of everyday, the dailybckup file grows larger and larger until it is now almost 60 GB. If I would like to restore one day, do I restore using this backup which is even larger than my fullbackup file after I restore the full backup?

2. What can I do to create a new file everyday for the incremental backup?

3. I read from MSpress, that if you restoring incremental backup, you should start from the earliest one till the latest one. But since I only got one file, do that means that I just have to restore the one file? What is the difference then if compare to differential backup?

4. I recently found out that the disk storing all the backups is running low on disk space, which means that new backup cannot be created anymore. The daily backup is just taking too much disk space. Can you all suggest me another way/strategy of backup which is more efficient?

Thanks for reading this message. Yeah, I know it is long like Microsoft exam question. But please help.

sprkymrk

How many full backups do you have archived and how much space are they taking up?

For starters I would copy all but the last 5 full backups (so you have a months worth still easily on hand) to another disk/dvd/tape and store them offline to free up some space.

Next question I would ask is why are you doing incrementals? Do the backups take a long time to complete? Otherwise I would device a system of full daily backups, but archive them (to an external source) on a weekly basis. Just keep the last 7 days of full backups on the disk, plus maybe the month end backup. If you don't have an external media source such as a tape, dvd, or whatever you really should look into getting one.

Have you ever done a test restore using that huge incremental-appended backup file?

cert-taker

sprkymrk wrote:

How many full backups do you have archived and how much space are they taking up?

For starters I would copy all but the last 5 full backups (so you have a months worth still easily on hand) to another disk/dvd/tape and store them offline to free up some space.

Next question I would ask is why are you doing incrementals? Do the backups take a long time to complete? Otherwise I would device a system of full daily backups, but archive them (to an external source) on a weekly basis. Just keep the last 7 days of full backups on the disk, plus maybe the month end backup. If you don't have an external media source such as a tape, dvd, or whatever you really should look into getting one.

Have you ever done a test restore using that huge incremental-appended backup file?

To be frank, the company's backup strategy is like a mess when I joined. The daily backup couldn't start successfully due to not enough disk space, and this lasts for 2 months.

I think the reason why incremental is used, is to save disk space. Thanks for your suggestion.

Smallguy

I agree if your backup window allows for it I'd do fuill back ups everyday

but to abswer your question.. you should only need your incremental (which sound liek it's on one tape) and your last full backup (which sounds like it's on a different tape)


**not sure if your going ot tape or not but u get the point

cert-taker

We didn't have tape backup here. All of the backups are done on external harddisk.

helms20

This is exactly how my company is

Unfortunately we don't even have the room to archive any of our backups, so what I had to do is make a full backup every Sunday and have a differential every other night of the week. I also have the backup overwrite the previous differential (b/c it will re-back up anything from the last backup) to help us save some space. I know this is not the best solution but when you don't have a budget and cannot get any other forms of backup, what are you to do?