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Using Removable Storage with NTBackup

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by birdbyte

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Does anyone know if it's possible to automate NTBackup for the following strategy that uses a different tape for each week with two backup jobs:

Tape 1 - Normal backup job runs Monday
- Differential runs Tues - Fri (append)
Tape 2 - Normal backup runs Monday
- Differential runs Tues - Fri (append)
...and so on until the end of the month.
Month two the tapes get reused and overwritten.

2 .bks files: Weekly_Normal.bks scheduled to run every Monday night and Weekly_Differential.bks scheduled to run Tuesday through Friday.

This strategy was originally implemented because it is important for us to be able to restore a version of a document (spreadsheet, whatever) from a particular day. It is no longer working however because of hardware and backup software changes. It has worked really well for us (we also do a more thorough month end backup) and I would like to continue the scheme.

Thanks for any ideas.

3 replies

by bryan

I'm looking to do the same thing and in older verions of NTBackup this was easier but with W2K3 and RSM, etc. just randomly switching tapes, etc. really messes stuff up.

Did you get this working eventually?

by birdbyte

No luck so far. I'm not opposed to using the /um switch but it doesn't allow appends as far as I can tell. If I come across anything I'll be sure to post it here.

by birdbyte

I was not able to ever get my scheme to work exactly the way I wanted. I ended up configuring a series of (weekly/daily) backups in conjunction with removable storage, and implement it by manipulating the schedule. If you're interested in the details email me and I'll let you know what I did.

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