Symantec Backup Exec - Backup Schedule help

Soldato
Joined
27 Mar 2004
Posts
14,081
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Between Realities
We have a large amount of data on our file and printer server that we want to back up.

Current engineer had us setup to a Full backup every single day, this is approaching 17 hours backup time. Now I have always questioned this time frame, and now I'm in a position to change the schedule I'm looking at setting up an incremental backup.

Monday - Thursday - Incremental. Friday - Full backup. We don't run a backup scheduled for Sat\Sun so this allows us Saturday for the full backup to finish.

So I believe the above is very achievable, but I'm a little confused as to how the software differentiates between what has changed since the Friday tape, without the Friday tape being in the drive?

Does the software keep a snapshot? Am I approaching this correctly?

Thanks!
 
Soldato
Joined
4 Dec 2002
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3,940
Location
Bourne, Lincs
It marks the files when it does a full backup, then it knows which ones change over the coming days.

How we use to do tape backups is do a back up to file, then back that file up to tape, you got a lot more performance as you would stream a 20Gb+ file at once to tape rather than lots of little files.
 
Don
Joined
19 May 2012
Posts
17,050
Location
Spalding, Lincolnshire
As above, differential is a lot easier to deal with if you ever need to recover (or if you are testing your recovery strategy).

"Staging" - e.g. as above, backing up to a single place on disk first, then backing up to tape will improve performance, and also give you scalability with regards to backing up more than 1 server etc.


Depending on the volume of data you are looking at, and what technology your existing tape drive is, it could be worth looking at RDX cartridges as an alternative, which may deliver better performance, reducing both your backup time, and improving your recovery time.
 
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