Topic: DAR Workstation Backup Configuration

[Mirfster]

Sorry if this has been covered before, but I have read the "The Administration Manual" - "Backup or restore" and am still a bit confused as to what each option of the "Workstation Backup Settings" will provide?

I was wanting to make sure that I have a "Full Backup" of the Server done every Sunday and Incremental Backups the remaining days (Mon - Sat).  As well, I wanted to have the ability to go back up to one (1) year. 

So, would I configure the settings like this?:
Number of rotating backup sets: 52
Daily backups in each set: 7
Full backup is allowed on: Sunday

Also, I am not sure if the Server will automatically prune/delete/overwrite backups that are more than a year old?  If not, I suppose that a cron job could be configured to do this...

Again I am sorry if this has been covered elsewhere.

Thanks for any assistance.

[guest22]

Good questions. Obviously we need to adjust our documentation.
I'm not experienced enough to assist here, but I am sure someone will pop up soonish.

Cheers,
guest

[TerryF]

How big is a full backup? What device are you backing up to?

You will end up with 52 full backups with 6 incremental backups for each full backup

After backup set 52 the next full backup will replace backup set 1 along with all inc backups and create a new full backup set 1 and on it will go..

Might be more efficient to reduce the number of fulls and increase inc

You are placing a lot of faith in the device you are backing up to, it will hold all your backups

[Mirfster]

Each full backup will be about ~10 GB.  Currently the backups are being stored on a Drobo with 16 TB of space (~13 TB Usable).

I would be fine with having a full backup every month, however the incremental backups are where it would get tricky since there is not a consistent number to use (30 or 31 days...).

Customer actually added employee PSTs in the past and practically killed all space, this has since been remedied.  I will be upgrading them from SME 8 to 9 and wanted to attack the backup routine at the same time.

Aside from the backups, there is an offsite Server running AFFA for Disaster Recovery.  Thinking about that, I need to check to ensure AFFA works on SME 9...

What would the be suggested for a decent backup routine?

[TerryF]

Sounds fine, reliability should not be an issue. Offsite is always a good idea

There has been recent work on Affa 3 for sme9 don't know where it is at. Don't think the rise feature of affa 2 is present, not sure etc..
 

[guest22]

There has been recent work on Affa 3 for sme9 don't know where it is at. Don't think the rise feature of affa 2 is present, not sure etc..

Affa 3 is here http://wiki.contribs.org/Affa and is being used in production, including Rise function. We received many success reports going from SME Server 8 to 9 with Affa 3. As always, test, test, test before real deployment.

[Mirfster]

Glad to hear the AFFA 3 has had success so far.  I will be sure to test thoroughly before implementation.

Back on the backup configurations, can anyone see any way to configure the ability to have it:
1) Do a full backup monthly
2) Do incremental backups for the remaining days of the month

• Would get tricky since not all months have the same amount of days (29, 30 or 31)
• Leap Year would throw yet another wrench into the mix

Guessing that in order to really accomplish this, it would require manual intervention into the scripts or configuring DAR from the command line?  Thinking I will need to poke around a bit more and learn about DAR...

Any hints or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[janet]

Mirfster

Any hints or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

The SME server implementation focuses on a weekly cycle (or multiples of it), so use it as designed, rather than trying/wanting to use a monthly cycle.
ie configure for a 4 weekly cycle as that is the closest you will get.

If you start rewriting scripts & implementing manual workarounds, then you are likely to have those changes or the backup configuration overwritten during the next upgrade etc.


IIRC Affa can retain a monthly backup, but it is really every 4th weekly backup, so no better there either.
From what I read, Affa for SME 9 while being stated or implied as "production ready", is still under testing, so proceed with care.


The main point I would make is to swap your backup disk every day & remove it offsite overnight, ie have minimally two disks that you rotate regularly eg daily or weekly.
If you wait a month to swap a backup disk, & the disk fails after 3 weeks, then all recent backups are lost.
With a 2 disk backup, you need to manually force the system to create 2 full backups on consecutive days (or copy the backup onto a second USB disk) & then reset for daily incrementals.

This approach works better with Affa,
The dar method does not keep a sequential backup numbering sequence on both disks (which will affect/prevent restores), but if a restore becomes essential to perform, then the filenames (numbering) can be manually corrected/renamed.

Also relying on the (I assume single) offsite Affa backup is problematic, what if something goes wrong with that, then you have no disaster recovery backup to restore from.