Using 1 Tape for mu;tiple backup jobs

[JAllan]

Good news about the sp2 version to include a Weekly rotation will be great. I assume that it will be possible to set the FULL Backup on a specfic day, since for many businesses it would be nice if the backup runs on a day they are working and not the weekend. I normally have the full backup run on a Friday(I guess that's just tradition though), with Mon-Thursday as Incremental/Differential, depending on how data much there is. That way you have End of Week, Month and Year tapes.

Cheers

[D Lancaster]

The new "Daily Incremental" rotation in 3.5 SP2 will work exactly as you described. You have the choice of which day the full backup occurs and how many weeks of tapes you want to manage. The default is Friday full with Mon-Thurs incrementals appended and a 4 weeks of tapes maintained.

I still have people looking at your OBDR issues so don't give up yet.

DL

[JAllan]

Thank you :-) Not giving up just yet!

[Chris Mirchandani]

I thank all of you for adding to this thread. Mr. Lancaster, I thank you for all the technical help. In response to your last reply about RAID support, I understand that things may work one way and not other ways. Meaning, we can take a "if it works this way, then it should work that way" approach, but that will not always work with the complex electronics that we are dealing with here. As far as I know, OBDR works with all of my hardware and should have no issues. There is no software utility that I know of for this Adaptec SATA RAID 2610SA Controller card. Smart Start does not see it when I click configure raid, so I have to use the BIOS RAID utility to setup the RAID logical disks. Smart Start does see it to create partitions on the logical disks and will partition them and install Windows Server. If SmartStart can load a driver for this, I would think the OBDR sofware could too. When I looked at the OBDR compatibility list today, I did not see the ML310 G3 listed, so maybe this model is only supported in older versions of Data Protector Express.

[JAllan]

I've been trying the long winded restore just to see if it works - Well it worked partially!

Process - Rebuild windows - with same Machine name, then install Tape drivers and DPE. Restored the calalog and rebooted.

I was able to recover the system drive, but now I cannot get data partition (it's just another 250GB SATA disk drive) to restore. The tape drive simply locks up - or appears to do so. The restore job starts but as soon as it starts restoring the files it appears to hang - The Left hand green light on the drive stops flashing and it never moves on with the progress stuck on the same file at 2%.

I have around 300Mb of software downloads - all HP stuff for the tape drive actually. It hangs on the Data protector Express V3.5 SP1 .exe file!

I have updated the driver using the Windows update method from the Device Properties. This updated to a 1/11/2007 driver by HP.

I tried uninstalling DPE and rebooting, then re-installing and Restoring the Catalog again!!

Well I'm not having much luck with the HP DAT72 Drives and Data protector Express - I've just deleted the paragraph I was going to write in CAPS as it probably wasn't helpful!!!

Dave - Is there any other software you can supply me - I see that Quantum is bundling Backup Exec Quickstart with their product - Maybe I need to return the 3 drives I have and buy a Quantum drive (I believe it's the same hardware) so that I get some software that works a bit better or go back to Windows Backup with scripts for scheduling!

[D Lancaster]

Chris and JAllen,

A couple of notes on OBDR. Several companies sell tape drives that use the same tape format but only HP tape drives support OBDR. But OBDR is limited in it's capabilities. That's why HP tests possible solutions and documents the ones that work.

The support matrix at http://hp.com/go/obdr lists the only combinations guaranteed to work. If you want to try a different software, the ones that support OBDR are listed there.

DL