I am just quoting my learned college in Mentor, who was advised by Rational that incremental backups were not the way to go. I see your point that there's little you can do with a volume of your size, but since we are talking about a database with file history, should you suffer any mishap in your backup software, would that cause a major problem in your ability to restore?
We use netbackup, and I know there are times when the software misses a backup. It did last night!
Simon -----Original Message----- From: John Stoffel To: Clawson, Simon Cc: 'Kumar, Rahul'; toasters@mathworks.com Sent: 27/06/03 22:03 Subject: RE: Clearcase and Netapp
Simon> This kind of adds weight to the argument for having a separate Simon> volume. You are not wise to do incremental backups of CC Simon> data. There is no real way to restore an incremental, so full Simon> backups are required, and this means nightly full backups of Simon> the whole CC data. If you are chucking other data in there as Simon> well this means full nightly backups of ALL your data! CC data Simon> grows fast, so will be a big lump on its own.
I just wanted to chime in here and say that this is wrong, incremental backups of VOBs data works just fine, as long as the previous full and all the incrementals were properly locked when the backup was made.
We use Legato Networker with incremental backups on our VOBs and we've never had a problem. Since the VOBs are around 300gb for a full backup, and 60gb a night for incrementals, it's a *huge* savings in tape to do it this way.
You need to make sure that your backup software offers a true incremental restore option though, plain old dump/restore won't work right since it doens't handle files that existed in the full, but not in the incremental case.
John John Stoffel - Senior Unix Systems Administrator - Lucent Technologies stoffel@lucent.com - http://www.lucent.com - 978-399-0479