Example 1 - Small Office, 500GB, VXA Tape Technology, No Disk Stage
Exabyte VXA-320 Packetloader 1x10
• Single Tape Drive with 10 Tape Slots and barcode reader
• 160GB/tape Native per Tape Capacity (X23 tapes) (1.6TB Total Native Capacity) Environmental Data Requirements
• 500GB Total Data on 15 Client Systems In Full Backup • 8GB/day average change for Incremental Backups • 4 Weeks of Rotation (24 VXA X23 Tapes Total) Create 3 destinations (Data Manager -> Destinations):
• Weekly Full Slots 1-4 • Daily Inc Slots 5-6 • Emergency Access Slot 10
Place the remaining 3 tapes into the Free Pool (Tools -> Device Configuration): • Free Pool Slots 7-9
Create the Backup Definitions and Set the Schedules:
•Create a “New...” backup job definition •Set the Destination to “Weekly Full” •Set the Backup Type to Full
•Set the Job Type to Backup
•Set the Overwrite Setting to Overwrite •Click “OK”
•Select the clients systems and data •Click “Save”
•Answer “Yes” to the Schedule question
•Set How Often to Weekly •Set the Every value to 1
•Run Starting day should be a Friday
•At Time should be set for some time after the normal workday ends.
•Select the Full backup definition and click the “Duplicate...” button.
•Change the Job Name to “Daily Inc 1” •Set the Destination to “Daily Inc”
•Change the Backup Type to Incremental •Change the Overwrite Setting to Append •Set the Base Job to the saved Full backup job •Click “OK”
•Repeat this for Incremental jobs 2-4 (Tuesday through Thursday)
•Set the schedule for each job (1-4) •Set How Often to Weekly
•Set the Every value to 1
•Run Starting day should be set appropriately •At Time Should be after normal working hours
The results of this setup will be a complete backup of the selected system(s) occurring every Friday and over the weekend as time requires to the tapes in the first four slots of the library overwriting any
existing data. Starting on Monday, and running each weekday evening, an incremental backup of the same systems and paths specified in the Full backup job definition will be run with the resulting archive (s) being written in appended mode to the tapes in slots 5 and 6. Because the Incremental data average change rate of 8GB/day is far less than the 160GB native capacity of the VXA X23 tapes, we will write multiple Incremental jobs to the tapes in slots 5 and 6. This means that the Incremental backups for each week will be on the tapes in these 2 slots appended one after the other.
In the event that either the full or incremental jobs require more tape than currently assigned, BRU Server will select an unused tape from the Free Pool (slots 7-9) and automatically extend the
destination. The job using the tape from the Free Pool will include this information in its summary email and job history report so that you may track which tape was added to the destination for rotation
purposes.
At the end of each week (Friday Morning in this rotation scheme), the tapes in slots 1-6 are removed and replaced with fresh tapes with the full backups (“Weekly Full” - tapes from slots 1-4) sent for offsite storage; the “Daily Inc” tapes (slots 5 and 6) can be kept onsite, or sent offsite as well.
After the fourth week of rotation, the first week’s tapes are brought back onsite, the “Daily Inc” destination is Recycled (See the “Tools” -> “Server Commands” panel) and the four week rotation starts over.
As an additional safety precaution, an out of sequence full backup (a manual “Run Now” of the Full job definition) could be run and saved offsite, allowing the normal full tapes to remain onsite for an extra week. Also, this “master” backup could be used for things like security audits on the client systems by using BRU Server’s Verify Comparison mode.
Finally, in the event that a special backup or restore operation was required, you can use the
Emergency Access destination defined above so that you don’t need to remove and replace the normal rotation media and potentially interfere with your normal backup scheduling.
Example 2 - Small Office, 200GB, Standalone LTO-2, DIsk Stage
HP LTO-2 StorageWorks Ultrium 448 Tape Drive • Standalone LTO-2 Tape Drive
• 200GB/tape Native Capacity • 150GB Assigned Disk Stage Environmental Data Requirements
• 200GB Total Data on 30 Client Systems in Full Backup • 5GB/day Average change for Incremental Backups • Full Backup Every 2 Weeks
• 8 Weeks of Full backups (4 LTO-2 Tapes)
• 2 weeks of Incremental Data Saved on the Disk Stage No New Destination Definitions Required
Uses the Default Standalone Destination and the Stage Disk Open the Preferences and set the default Max Stage Age to 21 days Create the Backup Definitions and Set the Schedules:
•Create a “New...” backup job definition •Set the Destination to “HP-default” (This is a tape destination)
•Set the Backup Type to Full •Set the Job Type to Backup
•Set the Overwrite Setting to Overwrite •Click “OK”
•Select the client systems and data •Click “Save”
•Answer “Yes” to the Schedule question
•Set How Often to Weekly
•Set the Every value to 2 (every other Friday) •Run Starting day should be a Friday
•At Time should be set for the end of the business day (so the tape admin can ensure a tape is ready)
•Select the Full backup definition and click the “Duplicate...” button
•Change the Job Name to “Daily Inc” •Set the Destination to “Stage Disk” •Change the Backup Type to Incremental •Change the Compression Setting to Enabled •Set the Base Job to the saved Full backup job •Click “OK”
•Set How Often to Monthly •Set the Every value to 1
•Run Starting day should be the Monday following the Full job’s first Friday
•At Time should be after normal working hours •Check the Day checkboxes Mon - Fri
•Check all Week checkboxes
The results of this setup will be a complete backup of the client systems occurring every other Friday to what should be a single LTO-2 tape. Then, every weekday, an incremental backup of the client systems will be written to the server’s Disk Stage path. The Staged archives will remain on the Disk Stage for 14 days. Once the Incremental backups reach 22 days old (3 weeks +1 day), they will be automatically aged out of the system and deleted from the Stage. At this point, a fresh full backup of the client
systems will have been completed and the previous incremental data should no longer be required. We keep the incremental archive an extra week for that inevitable “Just In Case” situation.
Each Monday, the tape administrator should remove the current LTO-2 tape and store if safely offsite. At the end of four full backups (8 weeks), when the fourth full tape is taken offsite, the first is brought back onsite to start the full rotation again. As each following week’s tape is taken offsite, the oldest offsite tape is brought back onsite for the next full backup.
Optional UpStage Operation
Instead of Aging the Incremental backups out and simply deleting them, additional tapes can be added to the rotation and the Incremental Stage backups could be UpStaged to tape for long term retention and offsite storage. This UpStage would be executed once a month after the latest Friday full operation is completed.
Example 3 - Larger consulting office, 2TB total storage, HP StorageWorks 1/8 G2 Tape Autoloader, 7TB iSCSI DIsk Stage
HP StorageWorks 1/8 G2 Tape Autoloader • 1 Ultrium 1760 LTO-4 tape drives • 8 tape slots
• 800GB / tape native capacity • 6.4TB total native tape capacity • 3TB assigned iSCSI disk stage Environmental Data Requirements
• 2TB Total Data on 175 Client Systems in Full Backup • 70GB/day Average change for Incremental Backups • Full Backup Every 2 Weeks
• 8 Weeks of Full backups (16 LTO-4 Tapes)
• 8 weeks of Incremental Data Saved on the Disk Stage for versioning Create 2 Destinations of 4 slots each
• Weekly 1 Full • Weekly 2 Full
Open Preferences and set the default Max Stage Age to 56 days Create the Backup Definitions and Set the Schedules:
Full backups run every 2 weeks:
•Create a “New...” backup job definition •Set the Destination to “Weekly Full 1” •Set the Backup Type to Full
•Set the Job Type to Backup
•Set the Overwrite Setting to Overwrite •Click “OK”
•Select the client systems and data •Click “Save”
•Answer “Yes” to the Schedule question
•Set How Often to Weekly
•Set the Every value to 4 (every 4th Friday) •Run Starting day should be a Friday
•At Time should be set for the end of the business day (so the tape admin can ensure a tape is ready)
Repeat this setup for “Week 2 Full” assuring that the starting date is 2 weeks after the previous. In the above example, the dates would be Jan 4th and 18th.
Incremental backups will run daily on weekdays and weekends except for the weekend of the full backups
•Create a “New...” backup job definition •Change the Job Name to “Incremental 1-1” •Set the Destination to “Stage Disk”
•Change the Backup Type to Incremental •Change the Compression Setting to Enabled •Set the Base Job to the saved Full backup job •Click “OK”
•Answer “Yes” to the Schedule question
•Set How Often to Daily
•Set the Every value to 14 (every 14th day)
•Run Starting day should be the Monday following the base full (Week 1 Full in this case)
•At Time should be set for the end of the business day (so the tape admin can ensure a tape is ready)
Once saved, select expand the “Week 1 Full” job and select the “Incremental 1-1” job and click “Duplicate...”. Rename the job to “Incremental 1-2” and click “OK”. Set the scheduled start day to the Tuesday and the every value to 14. Repeat this for Incremental jobs 3-12 (taking the schedule through the Friday of the next Full backup).
Finally, duplicate “Week 1 Full”, changing its name to “Week 2 Full” and changing the schedule start date to 2 weeks after the “Week 1 Full” start date (in this case, Jan 18th). Next, duplicate each of the incremental jobs changing their start dates to 14 days after their “Incremental 1-X” counterparts.