Backup Issue

mipouk

Hi Guys

We are trying to implement some form of backup solution where we can ensure that on any day we can restore a file.

The issue we have is that some offices are all over the UK and only backup to our core location in london at around 3mb a minute. A full backup initially took 3 weeks for some offices. If we do a full backup and then an incremental and have 2 weeks worth, it ends up with us not being able to restore files from the days after the full backup. this is because the full backup was taken days before a particular file was added, and the incrementals overwrite after 2 weeks.

We cant do differentials becuase they will inflate in size and we cant control the size of the differentials because we are not in a positon to do a monthly full backup, as they take 3 weeks!

The only solution we can see is to do multiple robocopy scripts that do a full backup and then store changes in different folders and ditch backup exec. Has anyone got any suggestions about how we can make sure all files can be restored by using backup exec?

thanks,

dynamik

Have you looked at Windows Storage Server at all? The ones we use only create one base image and then they do incrementals every fifteen minutes. The cool thing is that the incrementals are compacted into daily, weekly, monthly, etc. files, so you don't need to restore thousands of incrementals. You can even create a virtual machine from your latest incremental if a machine fails! I believe you can only get it as part of a hardware bundle with a third party, so features might vary a bit between vendors. Our VMs run in VirtualBox, and I have a difficult time believing that's something MS included.

Also, if you're just wanting to restore a file that users accidentally deleted, consider implementing shadow copies for shared folders at each site.