Hi,
We have 2 3600 R2 appliances - one at our Live site and another at DR. We have the following design:
- The Live appliance backs up the servers each night and then duplicates the backup sets to DR (DR is the CAS)
- The DR appliance will act as an offsite store and also duplicate the backups to tape
- We are storing 4 weeks of backups on disk and would like to have 6 months on tape
Our current strategy is fairly standard - full backups every Friday and Incremental backups every other night. We have an issue though as our file server backup is around 1.5TB and the full backup takes days to duplicate to DR. This would chew up our WAN link each weekend. I'm investigating whether we should move to a different backup strategy that reduces the number of full backups.
The solution I'm considering is to create an initial full backup of each server and duplicate to DR, then run incrementals from that point onwards. We would retain 4 weeks worth of incrementals on disk and then create synthetic backups and duplicate to tape either each week or month.
I've read through the admin guide, various web posts and videos and am not 100% sure if this solution will work. I'm struggling to find info on the "forever incremental" scenario. Can anyone advise? Any advice appreciated.
Thanks