Archiving Strategies

Info Type: General

For AE 3.3.4 and later:

Vault backups – Replicate backups to the same or different media type using the Vault tab in ZMC

• Vault backups for disaster recovery – vault backups on onsite media to media that is offsite such as the Cloud or to media that can be easily taken offsite such as tapes
• Vault backups for longer retention period

For AE 3.3.3 and later:

Retain most recent backups in the Staging Area with older backups offsite either in the Cloud or on tapes

• Configure a certain size of backup data to be retained in the staging area instead of immediately written off to tape as a percentage of your tape size
• This can be configured with settings in the Advanced Options section of the Backup|staging page for a backup set that writes to tape

For all versions:

Use multiple backup sets.

For Example, run daily backups to disk in one backup set and weekly or monthly full backups to tape or cloud in another.  Please note that consideration should be made when backing up the same object–directory/application/database–from two different backup sets.  Interaction may occur whereby an incremental backup in one backup set may end up being based on a full backup in another backup set.

• Linux/Solaris/Mac file system backups and backups using NDMP and NFS run the risk of interaction when identical entries are used. To always avoid interaction, use hostname in one backup set and FQDN/IP in the other or use alias in one backup set and no alias or a different alias in the other. When using extended attributes for Linux/UNIX file system (Schily tar), one must use the latter (different alias).
• Windows file system. Windows System State, and VM on ESX host backups never run the risk of interaction.
• All others�MS SQL, MS Exchange, MS SharePoint, Oracle & PostgeSQL database,  and backups using CIFS�  always run the risk of interaction.

For AE 3.1 and earlier:

Retain most recent backups in the Staging Area – Manually set Staging Area thresholds

• What is Amanda Enterprise Backup Staging Area?

Regularly Archive tapes for longer retention

• Use the Backup| Media page to Archive tapes – takes tapes out of the usual tape rotation until unarchived

Replicate tapes for longer storage with the Vault feature of Amanda Enterprise

• Command-line tool to copy a backup from disk to tape or cloud
• Works well when forcing full backups once a week or month

RAIT (Redundant Array of Independent Tapes)

• How to configure a RAIT (Redundant Array of Independent Tapes) with a mirror and virtual tape drive