Backup solutions

[mairving]

I am trying to figure out the best backup solution for a server. The system is a hybrid one, Netware 3.1, Windows NT 4 SP6a, Windows 2000, Exchange 5.5. The current backup drive is a DAT one. Currently there is a full backup done on the Netware box which takes 2 tapes. There is a backup done on the NT box which takes 3 tapes. All of the user shares are on the Netware box but the Netware server will soon be done away with and the user shares moved to the NT server. So I need to come up with a better, faster backup. I have looked at some AIT and DLT drives and I am trying to figure out why someone would set the system up for a full backup instead of incrementals.

So the questions are:
What do you think the best solution for backup?
How do you feel about incremental as opposed to full backups?

Thanks.

p.s. Long term goal is to replace the NT box with a Linux one. The Windows 2000 box runs some specialized software on SQL server so I am kind of screwed on that one.

[HAL9000]

I know how you feel about the backups. I have several clients that use a particular brokerage software and as part of their support routine, only full backups are done. You may want to consider simply a newer tape drive. One of my clients that was running a HP SCSI was taking 3.5 hours to do a backup and they were getting close to having to use a second tape (4Gb compressed). Their drive died (out of warranty) and I replaced it with a Sony 24Gb drive. Well, comparing the two, that Sony is FAST! The full backup now takes about 30 minutes. Not sure just how much data you need to back up, so hard to say whether the above comparison is of any benefit.

Another solution is a Snap server. The downside to that being that you don't have an off-site backup just in case say, the building burns down.

Third, I have a client using online backups, but they are incremental which makes sense as you don't want that huge upload every night.

[mairving]

Well right now, the DAT tapes are 24G and it takes 5 of them. I haven't been able to totally identify where most of the data is coming from but there are 4 main areas: SQL server, Exchange, Communications, Multimedia. Now the communications dept uses Photoshop, Pagemaker, etc for publications so there are some very large files there. The video/sound production uses Premiere and such for editing sound/video which is also quite large.

[HAL9000]

LOL...OK... we're talking serious amounts of data here. None of the places I deal with need to go beyond a 24Gb compressed tape.

[glc]

I would do a full backup - then do differentials. When the differential gets too big for a single tape, it's time to do another full and start the cycle over. The advantage of this is a full restore is done by restoring the last full and then the latest differential.

[mairving]

Yeah, I am kind of leaning towards incremental. A full backup of all the data takes so long that it is easier to bomb out after a few hours. Now I just need to get a bigger/faster drive.