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Backup Solution Best Practices / SOP?

I'm trying to optimize our backup solution by starting with the backup jobs first however, I need to present justification for changing the entire process. We use tape backups and physical replace the tapes quarterly with new tapes. We have 60 tapes total. We don't really overwrite them.

I'm trying to optimize this process to save money and for most efficiency based off of standard operating procedures and best practices.

Does someone have something simliar that I can use as a template or at least something with the correct formating with what I'm trying to do?

vikasjus

Hi

You should have noted something about current process so that suggestion could have very specific points as where improvement is required, what is not as per recommendation and what need to be done to control cost.
I think following are few aspects that you must consider.
Backup is something which will save you in disaster so cutting down on cost should not be done at cost of business loss or data loss.
So most impotently
-      Note down critical server/production servers (Mail server, database server, any ERP/SAP etc.)
List down less critical servers
-      List down utility or non impacting servers
-      List down data and its size that you want to backup from production servers
-      List down data and its size that you want to backup from less critical servers
-      List down configuration backup for utility servers (AD, DNS, DHCP etc)
Once you have list of above items, draft it in a document and set schedule at what intervals this document will be audited with actual process and actual presence of above items.
At same time get approval from business about data that you are backing up. So that they will also have clear image of what things are getting backup and what is not. Set schedule for this review also.
For backup job you will get fare idea from above listing that who much of total data you will have to backup in your environment.
According to data size and speed of backup device calculate approx amount of time required to backup listed data size.
Next step that you will have to do is break this data size into severity, which is at what interval these data should be backup. I mean daily, weekly, monthly, you have to identify what amount of data need to be backup on daily basis, weekly basis and on monthly basis.
Most common and easy breaking is as follows
Keep separate tape cartridge for Database backup, and file backup.
Database is something you will have to take daily differential backup and file is also daily differential. Keep full backup at weekends for both database and file. Now here your weekly backup will take time that you have calculated in above listing. Differential backup will take much less time than weekly backup.
Here is tape rotation that you can follow. I assume that you have one DB server and one FS server so tape usage will be as follows
I will maintain two sets of 6 cartridges for daily backup and 5 tapes for weekly backup so total tape required in a month will be 22 plus you will have to keep 24 tapes for whole year. So to backup two different servers I need to maintain 46 tapes.
Further in more details how these tapes will be recycled in a whole years is as follows.
In first week of month Use 6 different cartridges from Monday to Saturday and perform differential backup. On Sunday use full backup cartridge and perform full backup. Now out of these set Sunday backup tape should be sent to offsite location as weekly backup and rest other tapes that is tapes used between Monday to Saturday should be recycled in next week. Add new tape for Sunday. Again this time Sunday backup tape will go to off site location and rest other will recycle for next week on respective days. Keep this cycle till last week and keep on adding new tape on Sunday.
Once you reach month end send last week Sunday full backup to offsite location as monthly backup and recycle entire set of tapes including Sunday backup for next month.
At year end keep monthly backup as is in offsite location and discard old tapes and use new tapes.
This cycling will give you optimum backup availability but off course at some cost as in a year you will have to maintain minimum 23 tapes for single server. Now question is you are not saving on cost so setup your backup jobs and server data backup in such manner so that one tape can have multiple servers backup or one tape is capable of taking all server backups. So it depends on size of tape cartridge that you are using for backup.

SOLUTION