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Filesystem device for backups and/or BackupExec devices

  • July 9, 2007 at 5:23 pm

    #117368

    I have a Win2k3 + SS2K server with some smaller DB's with 2 larger 30 and 50GB databases. Currently a full backup using Backup Exec occurs at night between midnight and 6am. The timing depends on the backup of many other servers in the backup. A local full backup takes 20 minutes with no load and longer if users are on it...I get about 38MB/s on a RAID-1 mirror. The users are not humans, but an assembly line that runs 24x7 with limited maintenance windows.

    I like the reliability of the tape backups as well as old backups for testing, but for potential recovery speed, I want to start Full backup's on the local filesystem once a week on Sundays, with differential nightly Mon-Sat with a log backups every 15 or 30 minutes. I am not the tape admin and if somethings goes down, I cannot wait for them to "get back to me".

    Since differential backups contain everything since the last full backup, I suspect I have to a stop using the tape device and use the tape to just backup the filesystem. Is that a correct assumption?

    I have other questions for B/U experts. I will put that one another thread.

    Thanks,

    -- Frank

  • July 9, 2007 at 11:27 pm

    #718170

    If your tape backup is running daily then you can place the backups on disk and then take the files to tape so that they are consitent enough. Yuo too will have the option to take it from disk or tape on need.

    Cheers,
    Sugeshkumar Rajendran
    SQL Server MVP
    http://sugeshkr.blogspot.com

  • July 10, 2007 at 11:36 am

    #718366

    Sugesh,

    Thanks for a timely reply. What I wanted to accomplish was taking advantage of using the backup to tape devices as a Plan-B. Plan-A is  using filesystem backups for full, diff and log backups. Since the tapedevice backup runs on a different and unreliable schedule. I though both the diff and log backups could get to hard to keep track of and not reliable for restores.

    Basically I wanted to use both a tape and filesystem backup schedule, but I think that is not worth the trouble. I will likely just use filesystem backups for Full, Diff and Logs and backup  these files to tape.

    Thanks,

    --Frank

  • July 10, 2007 at 1:57 pm

    #718412

    Frank;

    You are correct on the problems with log backups and recovery when having two separate full backups.  You are better off just having the SQL backups to disk files, then use BackupExec to backup those files.

    I would also suggest writing those backups files to a separate server, if available locally.  It would be safer to have the backups on a separate server so they are not at risk in case of disk failure on the server hosting SQL Server.

    Hope this helps



    Mark

  • July 11, 2007 at 3:39 am

    #718545

    As mark says you can move to a server locally if you have additional hardware resources else better stick off with disk and tape combination.

    Cheers,
    Sugeshkumar Rajendran
    SQL Server MVP
    http://sugeshkr.blogspot.com

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