Hello everyone,
I have a couple of generic questions about using Veritas Backup Exec. The questions are related to backing up data from several servers using two media servers, both on the same LAN.
1) When backing up from a remote server does the data that's being backed up actually pass through the Veritas media server or does the media server simply initiate the 'copying' of the data from the network location to say a tape library or a NAS.
2) If the data does not pass through the Veritas media server, what would then be the benefit of having directly attached storage devices to the media server? If it does, could one benefit from having the server that has attached storage also being the media server.
3) Let's say I have a NAS with two large disk arrays, one containing a file share and the other the backup storage space. So the data being backed up is basically going from one array to another array on the same server. Would it then be beneficial to have an additional media server installed on this server to handle this particular backup job?
4) When backing up to disk devices the media server continues to create new media on the disk until the disk is full instead of overwriting older media that is no longer protected. How do I configured the disk backup not to consume all the available disk space on the server?
Thanks
/L
1) Data from the remote agents passes through the media server before being passed onto the final destination. While in the case of backing up to NAS it may not be quite as evident, but when you think about it, it makes sense for tape backups. The media must be passed through the media server in order for it to access the USB/SCSI cables that connect to the tape drives.
2) The data does pass through the media server so this question isn't applicable.
3) The answer to this one as I understand it is a bit odd. When working with the Symantec engineers (above L2 support) to resolve one issue they actually told me that even for local backups data still passes through the network and that the ports used by BE still need to be open. For this reason, I don't think using the additional local media server would be very beneficial, at least from an efficiency standpoint. It could be beneficial from a redundancy standpoint however in the case that the other media server goes down this server would still be getting backed up.
4) How many days do you want to be backed up at a time? My solution for what you're doing in the past has been to setup individual jobs. Say I'm doing a 14-day backup rotation, I could set them to overwrite the backup folder with 14 different backup jobs. This might be a bit too micro managed for you however.
The other option is to set how much backup space is available to be used. For instance, you can set it up to have 7 backups with a max of 20gbs of data used for each for a total of 140gb.
Hope this helps!