Question : Backup Policy

I have been asked to do a review on our company's backup policy. At the moment we have a Sony 200GB (compressed) Tape drive, Backup Exec v10d and a 10 day tape rotation with each day being a full backup. We have a monthly and yearly backup as well. Since I don't have much experience with enterprise backups, what are the most used backup policies, software and global ideas about this issue?

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Cheers,

Jason

Answer : Backup Policy

Yes we do full backup everyday. It all depends on how much data you want to backup and how "quick" the data need to be restored in case of a breakdown.

Full backup of course takes longer to perform, but data can be restored easily and quickly. All you need is to insert the tape taken from the previous night into the drive and find the file(s) you want. An incremental backup takes less time to perform, but it takes much longer to recover the data. An Incremental backup only stores files that has been changed since the last FULL backup taken place.

The advantage of lower backup times comes with a price: increased restore time. When restoring from incremental backup, you need the most recent full backup as well as EVERY incremental backup you've made since the last full backup. Have a read of the following articles for more info :-

For FULL backup
http://www.backup4all.com/full-backup.php
For Incremental backup
http://www.backup4all.com/incremental-backup.php

There is no right or wrong strategy and it depends on your own requirement. However if your server runs Exchange and/or SQL Server then I would definitely recommend to take FULL daily backup. Restoring Exchange or SQL Server from Increment backup is a pain in the backside.

Normally backup is scheduled to run overnight. So unless it is taking too long and is not completed before the next morning I wouldn't consider incremental backup. We backup approx 65Gb of data and it takes about 4 hours. Mind you our tape drive is more than 2 years old and recent tape drive has a faster I/O speed.

One more thing which is fairly important to your backup strategy - remember to keep the tapes in a safe place (off-site). I take the tape with the previous backup home everyday so in case of any diaster we have the latest backup in hand. We store all our archives in a fire-prove safe