[techtalk] RE: backup newbie

[Magni Onsoien]

Brian Sweeney:
> 
> I don't know much about Arkeia, but a quick note: unless you're really
> hard-up for tapes, or just have disgusting amounts of data to backup, I
> would go with differentials instead of incrementals.  Who wants to have to
> juggle 7 tapes if the server goes kaplowee on saturday and your full backups
> happen on sunday? :(

Eh, what exactly is the difference between incremental and differential
backups? I thought both were the differences since the last full backup
or from the last backup of a certain level, i.e. equal.
Depending on the amounts of data, a monthly full backup, a weekly
incremental compared to the monthly full and a daily backup compared to
the weekly is often good enough. Then you'll have to restore at most
three tapes (or tape sets) when something is crashing. 

In our company we take a weekly full backup to be stored on tape, and then 
a daily incremental backup to disk. At the uni I used to work, there was a
monthly full backup, weekly incremental and daily incremental. This is
sufficient in environments where a day's work may be manually "restored",
but somewhat more mission critical data should be backed up more
frequently, of course.


Magni :)
-- 
sash is very good for you.