good ntbackup strategy

[tart666]

So I have been trying to setup automated backups for a few months.... Easy enough to do with ntbackup, but now I am wondering if the strategy I setup is giving me the maximum flexibility for restore options

Here's the current strategy:

Normal backup, overrite target bkf file, done monthly
Differential, append to separate bkf file, daily

does this look good?

(edit: my main concern is that if something happens during the normal backup, and that file gets corrupted then all is lost. One of the alternatives I am considering is setting up two normal backups, alternating between them, one every two months. Any other ways?)

 

[Abzstrak]

Run full ones every night, unless you just need differential for space savings or network bandwidth/time savings.

You hopefully are doing historical backups. I usually would use around 25 tapes for a 1 year backup (assuming a single tape for a backup.) I would setup a Monday, tues, wed, and thurs tapes. Then have week1, week2, week3, week4, and week5 tapes. Run the daily tapes on each proper day (mon on monday, tuesday on tuesday, and so on.) On the first friday run week1. On the following monday use the daily tapes again, but on the second friday run week2 and so on until you reach the eand of the month. You also need tapes setup for month1, month2, month3...... month12. on the last day of the first month, run month1 tape. The next month reuse all the daily and weekly tapes, but at the end of the month, run the month2 tape... and so on. At the end of the year, run a year1 tape. This takes 22 tapes for a decent 1 years worth of historical backups, plus I would add 3 tapes for extras cause the daily tapes will eventually give out, so its pretty cheap. Most restores are noticed in the first week, and can be restored off of whatever daily tape needed, otherwise move back to the previous weekly or monthly tape and go back as far as you need.

I also run about a months worth of backups to disk (usually about 500GB to 1TB RAID 5 sets) and keep however much I can fit on there. The tapes are for redundancy, which is the entire point of backups. The tapes can be run from the disks backup sets to improve entwork performance and allow tapes to be run during the day. I always keep disk backups on a machine by itself..... ALWAYS.

my primary advice....Do not run backups to disk unless its fault tolerant raid, and DO NOT EVER use disks that you are running your OS off of.

Also, consider backup exec or another piece of software that allows more flexibility that nt backup.... ntbackup is "ok" but not all that great.....

 

[tart666]

wow, that's a pretty nice plan there, Abzstrak, thx.

I really have zero budget for backup (i am a grad student), so I am doing backup to a Data partition on another computer (which serves as a desktop for another student). Each full backup is about 8GB, so I figure I have room for two full backups at most.

Considering that, I figured I'd have to use differential if I want to save a couple weeks' worth of file versions. Do you have any suggestions on a similar setup using differential approach?

 

[Abzstrak]

k, thats my backup plan for a small network/company.... lol, somehow I thought thats what you were doing. At home I have a small server, its running software raid5 and I setup logoff scripts on my systems (and mainly my wifes ;-) so that on logoff it makes a copy of the desktop, my docs, favorites, and a fe other key directories to the server. I've told my wife that if she wants things backed up to make sure she saves things to these specific directories, or tell me if she needs a new one backed up.... This keeps the data going to the server to being ONLY stuff that needs backing up, and consilidates it all to one location. I then about once a week backup that data to DVDRW (we only have about 3GB). For other things like the MP3's and other large directories I simply do not run regular backups, instead I keep multple copies of those files on different computers.... its not the best, but I don't have the cash for a tape drive ;-)

I think the main key is make sure your backing up ONLY the data you need, nothing else...not the windows directory, program files, or anything like that that eats alot of space. I would script it so that you can keep a backup of each system on the other system, since the chances of both dying simoultaneously is low. Then make weekly backups to some sort of removable media. The reason for this is that harddrives die, its not a matter of if they will die, its when they will die; they are mechanical devices and they will wear out eventually. a DVD burner can be had for $50-$60 and you could buy some dvdrw's for less than $1 each. You of course would have to intervene to put in a 2nd disc, but this is the cheapest solution I know of to handle you amount of data you have. You could then after a few months start resuing the dvdrw media obviously.