Example 1: automated media copying of filesystem backups

Your company has a MoM environment with two cells, each containing 150 computer systems (servers and workstations). On average, each system has 10 GB of data, which means that you have 3000 GB of data that you want to back up.

You want to have daily Incr1 backups of the data, weekly full backups, and monthly full backups for archiving purposes. The backups must be performed outside the company's working hours, which means that they can start after 5 PM and must finish before 8 AM on the next day; they can also run during weekends.

You decide to make copies of the backup media, which will remain on site for restore purposes, and to move the originals to an off-site vault for safety reasons. The media should be copied after the backups finish. To do this, you will use automated media copying.

You use an HP StorageWorks 6/60 Tape Library with 6 LTO drives, and LTO Ultrium 1 media. Based on previous experience, you assume that the data transfer rate is about 80 GB per hour, and the average capacity of a medium is 153 GB.

After the media copy operation, the source and the target media become non-appendable. Considering this, you may want to minimize the number of media required for the backup. It is recommended to start with empty media and use their maximum capacity. You can achieve this by creating backup specifications with only one device assigned. This ensures that a new medium will be used only after the current medium is full. However, this will increase backup time compared to writing to several media in parallel.

You decide to create 4 backup specifications. To save media space, the data is divided between the backup specifications in such a way that the minimum number of media possible is used. Only one device is used for each backup.

Automated media copying is performed after the backup is completed. You can use all the available devices for the operation. This means that 3 devices will be used for source media, and 3 devices for target media.

It is assumed that the media copying will take approximately the same amount of time as the backup.

Incr1 backup

Configuring backups

You schedule Incr1 backups each day from Monday to Thursday at 6 PM. The data protection is set to 4 weeks. Supposing that 30% of the data changes daily, you

Concepts guide

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