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What is the simplest of ways to backup my data:

  • It's a 1.5 TB disk (25% free now)
  • I have LTO4 tape and media 800/1600
  • I have Symantec Backup Exec

The data is not changing, only a very short % is added a week, and in terms of restore is not very urgent - I'd say with cautious that even if my HD fails today - it will not be too big of a loss.

My plan was to have 1 full backup a week The question will be:

how will the rest of the week be?

Should I even bother with incrementals/differentials for such low needed type of content? Maybe I can do it bi-weekly/monthly and keep it on a 3/2 tapes rotation? (1 month backward backup?)

I would like to hear from you if you have experience with such type of passive content.

3 Answers 3

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A question about backing up data like this is really subjective. If you don't even care about the data, why back it up? Is there financial loss if you can't access the data?

Are you short on backup space? Or are you so overbudgeted in space that you'll need to replace the tape due to wear and age before it even gets full?

If the content hardly ever changes and losing the data doesn't result in business interruption or even a shrug from your users, I'd back it up once a week or once a month (depending on how much of the data actually does change) and make it a priority to order a new tape once a year whether you need it or not to make sure the media is usable.

If it's truly a shrug-off, start working on a plan to decommission the server...you're wasting electricity on it.

In the end the backup plan entirely rests with what you're comfortable losing and impact on business.

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If it's low-volatility, low-criticality data, I'd probably just dump rsync incrementals to online disk; tape is a maintenance hassle that's only worth undertaking if you really need the stability and portability of offline media.

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  • thanks, online as an online service you mean? (cloud?)
    – Saariko
    Jan 15, 2012 at 12:36
  • No, I mean online as opposed to offline storage like tape that requires you to mount it before you can read data. For ~2TB of non-critical data, just having an available copy on a separate disk storage system should be sufficient. Jan 16, 2012 at 22:07
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There is a section in the Backup Exec Administrator's Guide on Media rotation strategies. I recommend that you read that.

Also, I agree with a previous post that suggested using a backup-to-disk folder for this type of backup. See http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO22749.

Sometimes you don't realize the importance of your data until you lose it, so I err on the side of caution when it comes to backups.

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