an idea to take into account is what about the incremental do you make a real incremental or a differential

once you have your full (level 0) you can make incremental (level 1) then another incremental should be level2 and so on

but if you keep on making level 1 every day, one backup will somehow make obsolete the previous level 1 in this you make a differential that record all changes between the time of backup and the time the full was made

doing this could let you save some cartridges (as you can reuse cartridges) but it can also make backup longer to complete

Dan Nowak wrote:

All,

As I am fairly new to Network Appliances, I would like your opinions on the best method for backing up a larger system. I am using a spectralogic 245 tape jukebox in stacker mode. I am trying to backup two separate volumes in utilizing a no-rewind device. As we are only in the testing mode, there is currently not that much data to back up, however when in full production, we fully expect a 1000+ users with a disk quota of 1 gig. We are not using any third party application such as Veritas or Legato Networker and are only using the dump and restore commands and the options associated with them. The NetApp documentation really is not that informative and I thought maybe some of the more experienced users out there may have some helpful suggestions.

Thank you in advance for any advice,

Dan