Backup Software / Hardware Recomendation

I would recommend doing an incremental backup each night, and then doing a full backup at the end of the week, for instance, our work week ends on a Friday, I do a full backup each Friday night, also having tape media for each Friday of the month, thus keeping data for a month, then I would go farther and do a full backup at the end of each month, thus keeping data over a year's period. Sometimes files end up corrupt without anyone knowing about it until months down the road, just a thought.

I think a lot has to do on how much data you have to back up. Us here have about 50Gb to back up so we do a full backup everynight. Currently we have only a one tape drive and it's almost to it's limit. So we will be going to a "jukebox" style backup so that we can still back up everything everynight. That way there isn't any confustion on to what tape has what. Every tape has everything on it.

Well, where software is concerned it does depend on what platform(s) you are backing up. I have most of my experience in mixed environments where each system sometimes requires different solutions since no one package supports them all. Typically you will see Microsoft/Novell NOS mixes and there are two main packages available, Computer Associate's ARCServe and Veritas Backup Exec. ARCServe is the defacto standard in that you see it in a majority of environs, yet it's support is difficult and it's implementation is problematic. I have yet to use Backup Exec yet a majority of what I hear from others that do use it in similar environments is quite favorable, so much so we are about to try it out in our testbed as a possible replacement for ARCServe.

Hardware really depends on how much you are backing up and your budget. DLT Libraries are the defacto standard here in that they are relatively fast as far as tapes go, they have good storage space, and they are available in "tape libraries" when your full backups require more than one tape. One caveat is that if you use any compression on your data storage then expect the low end of the advertised scale of tape storage when making the choice.

As for methodology, (differential, incremental, full, rotational, etc...) Your choice there is likely supported no matter what package you use and is dependent on size of backups, time required to backup, tape storage methods, disaster recovery plans, budget, and some part personal preference... This is, as you might be able to tell already, a different topic alltogether...

good luck, and let me know if you have other questions.

Are the sites separate or part of an enterprise? What are you going to back up? How much? Will the system shut down for the backup? What is your budget? What is in place already? Some generic info:

http://www.lanscape.com.au/Support/backup.htm

http://www.acn.purdue.edu/docs/sysadmin/backup/strategy.html

http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/security/story/0,2000024985,20262447,00.htm

and we also used HP software. Of the three, I liked Arcserve the best--until we lost a server and tried to restore from tape. Arcserve uses a proprietary tape format and you can only use Arcserve software to read and restore an Arcserve tape. Normally, that is a non-issue, but the one time we lost the hard drives it was a nightmare to restore. We even called Novell and created an incident (we had both Novell and NT platforms) and the Novell guru did not have any favorable comments about Arcserve. I agree with Packratt on the DLT tape libraries as a hardware solution. I love the combination of Veritas Backup Exec and HP DLT multi-tape libraries. I have been to Veritas workshops and I think their support is really good. Their licensing policies still confuse me. Also, 1 giga-bit fiber NIC's are worth their weight in gold. We get up to 500 MB per MINUTE throughput on SQL and Lotus Notes databases, 200-300 MB per minute on the rest of the file servers. GOOD LUCK and remember "THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS TOO MUCH BACKUP."

Recently we bought a HP Dat unit drive, who have a new tehcnology implemented. It is called OBDR (One Button Diaster Recovery). Check HP home page for details. The software shipped with the unit is Yosemite TapeWare, not a very good piece of app, but it knows OBDR implementation. With this, you can back-up entire system structure (partitions, filesystems, OS, apps ...) and restore it with one button click (nice, isn`t it ?).
In addition, we use ARCServe Backup for the database and users files.The backup method is up to you (regarding amount of space needed, backup time, etc.)
So, in case of system crash, we restore system files (OS, apps...) with OBDR technology. It takes about 2 hours (we have WinNT/Oracle Server, plus other tools&stuff). We have a specific tape for backing up this part of system.
Then we restore userfiles (the backup software is already restored :-) thanx to OBDR).
It shouldn`t take more than a half`o`day to restore the entire system. :-)
In addition we use ARCServe Replication for data availability on a secondary server in case that primary fails.

good luck on your backup strategy ... :-)