Backup Schedule

Is it a member server or a domain controller?

it you won't know you've backed up at all. If you are using distributed models there might be more to do than this one machine.
Worse case is a failure between Sauturday and Monday, you are going to have to restore the oprevious full back up and and each on the intervening incrementals. The ony way to reduce that is to do more full back ups.
I'm also presuming you rotate the weeklies round as well, sometimes it can take a long time for an error to show.
One standard format is to have fortnightly and monthly backups (at least two months) available. However this depends on the number of changes and the nature of the data. Being able to revert a database to last month to rescue it means you lose a months work and in a high transaction environment that would be extremely unpopular.

How about reading the manual.
The backup software that you are using should come with a manual which explains the pro's and con's of commomly used backup schemes. If the backup software that you are using is one of the mainstream ones then software should be able to create a backup set and schedule for you depending on your companys requirements. RTFM.

My schedule is (for now) exactly opposite that. Due to the large volume of data, it is not feasible to do a complete backup during the week. For that reason, we do incremental backups on Mon to Thurs, then do a full on Friday. I am going to reinstall our backup solution in about two weeks, and in addition to adding more tapes to the rotation, I am reevaluating how we do the backups so that we can perhaps do a full more often.

Now, that said, our database server with all of our financial data and customer data is on a seperate backup, and it gets a full backup each and every night.

One Question, why is this backwards?

Friday is when you want to do your fulls, all other times do your differential, except for Wednesday when you do an incremental.

We have lost ZERO data doing it like that, but then again, it might not be best for your situation.

if you have the tape capacity and the window, always do a full backup when possible.

my servers run the following schedule:

mon to thu - full backup (4 tapes, used weekly)
friday - full backup in 7 week rotation
end of month - full backup in 12 month rotation

some people have a 2nd set of mon to thu tapes, cycling the tapes every fortnight.

if you don't have terabytes of data, and can possibly manage it - do a full backup every day. The time to recovery is much less, the chance of recovery is higher.

You'd better restore to a non-production machine before you try it on the real-deal!

Yeah, I know I'm an idiot. Sorry.

I am not using Windows Backup but I can share my experience of using Backup Exec. I am using the backup scheme that same as your situation.

Back to your questions posted...
1) Is it necessary to change tape daily? I guess you are asking for days of running differential backup. That's very depends on the capacity of the backup tape. If it can house all copies of differential backup for a week, you can set the differential job to append to the media. But, remember to set the first day of differential backup job (the one after the full backup job) to overwrite the media.

2) Is it easy to restore? The easier way is full backup everyday as you only need one tape on-hand. Both differential or incremantal backup rely on the full backup tape if you need to restore files that did not modify after the full backup job. Thus, you need to identify the latest copy of the file is in the full backup tape or in a differential tape.

If you need further assistance, can you provide your environment details? Such as capacity of the tape, size of data to be backed up, backup windows requirement, data recovery requirement etc.

Hope this help.

particularly DAT, you can get lots of problems. I've had drives chew the tape. One sort of drive not liking a tape from a different model. Bad end of tape. Tapes in a draw and some one drowning them in coffee. Tapes in datasafe and person with key taking it on holiday (that's why there were tapes in a drawer). Prayers, lucky charms, and human sacrifices can't do any harm. Backups are Murphy's favourite playground. How paranoid you get should be related to the criticality of the machine you are backing up, not it's vulnerability.

Probably the best way would be to put together a grandfather - father - son backup schedule...

1st Sunday Month - Full Backup
Every Monday - Full Backup (save em until the monthly)
Every Tue - Sun - Differential (toss em at the Monday Backup)

Then, archive each monthly backup... you'll be able to go back as far as you want, and will take up the LEAST amount of tapes or whatever media you are using to backup with...

Hope that helps...

Having ran foul of back up tapes failing I have now split it into 3 parts, DB, User data and Email, with separate tapes for each part

Implemented the following backup schedule for each part

Mon ? Thu Full backup
Fri ? Weekly backup (4 weeks per month)
1st day of Month ? Monthly backup (12 Months per year)
End of year

Also have an online backup of the user data which is replicated each hour.

We have another server, which we mirror files from two other servers to every night. Most restores we do are from the previous day, so this is the quickest way for us to restore, just drag and drop.

We also set up the shares the same on the alternate server so that, in the event one of the primary servers fails, we can simply point the users to the alternate server in the login script, and they will be back up in minimum time (though with yesterday's data).

This is, of course, in addition to the tape backup.

Yes we did that too at one company. At another, we even had an off site shadow system. If our primary went down and we couldn't recover from the backups, we would bring up the shadow system. The users never knew when we were down because of it.

I work at a smaller office (@45-50 users, 5 servers), I don't ever mess with incrementals or differentials, every backup's a full backup. I maintain 4 weeks worth of regular use DLT backup tapes + offsite tapes, my file & print box is a hefty @50gb backup and that takes a little over 3 hours to complete. My exchange server is maybe a 20gb backup and maybe takes an hour to complete, my win2k adc is a small backup, probably doesn't take more than 20-30 min to backup and only contains maybe 3-4gb. My backup/SUS server is similar in size & time, same thing for my my navce server. I start my backups in the evening when there is no one working in the office. I use Backup Exec v8.6 with Open File Option so if there is a midnight shift running I can still backup any open files. I don't think combined my backups take more than 5-6 hours to complete not including the time I spend backing up exchange .pst dumps onto DVD-R media for offsite storage. When I read that your full backup takes 51 Hours, well it just scared the !@#$% out of me when I read it. You must work for a !@#$% huge company. What type of backup software & media do you use. Sounds like if anyone knows backup procedures, software & media to use, you would be the man, Change your handle to Backup Guru, your backups are a full time job for sure!

somewhere where complete strangers are trusted more than the employees.
Or did you all accidentally sign a contract making you and your entire family financially responsible for any loss of data.
LOL

I currently is using Hp Surestore as a backup device. After i play around with a few backup, I want to schedule a weekly backup using GFS method. But i cannot erase the data in the tape that i use to test previously.

All i can erase is the backup job name using Ms backup utilities.

I do some research on HP backup tape DDS3 on how to format or overwrite the media when i want to restructure the backup policy of my company.

Nothing was writen about how to format or reuse the tape.

Is that mean that the tape is only meant to use for one time with a single job name. How if i want to delete the data inside and add a fresh data in?

Any suggestion...