Good morning all,
I'm new to DPM and could use some advice on how to best utilize tape backups with DPM for short-term and long-term/offsite backups.
The total size of the data I'm backing up is about 13TB. I'm using LTO4 tapes, which takes about 17 to do a complete full backup. I have 80 tapes that I can use. The data I am backing up does not change very often, however, when there is a change, I want to capture it in my backups as soon as possible.
My thought is to do short-term incremental backups over the course of two weeks up to a month, if possible. Ideally at that point, instead of doing a second full backup as an offsite copy, I'd like to find a way that the system will just flag those short-term incremental backups as an offsite backup, and then prompt for new tapes to be put in to start the process over again. Also, by the time I'm putting backups on tapes 78, 79 or 80, the backup on tape 1, 2 or 3 is expired so I can rotate it back in and re-use it.
What I had been doing was not doing any short-term backups, but instead just doing long-term backups every two weeks, whether any new data was being backed up or not, and then I would put in a bunch of new tapes and do it again two weeks later. However, I did not have my retention settings set right, so I would run out of usable tapes and therefore could not do any further backups.
Could someone please give me some advice on how I should set up this protection group to meet the goals listed above?
