Help Regarding BACKUP Strategy

[Former Member]

Dear experts,

I am supporting a new client who is into cigarette manufacturing and we have to give them a good backup strategy as our implementation consultant has not provided them any support on this perspective.

So , I request all the experts to give me a good strategy so that I can suggest our client.

I was having this idea in my mind, but I want more of an expert help on this ..

Before this the system landscape is like this..

BI PRD

BI DEV on a single physical box running as two separate instances

R/3 PRD

R/3 DEV (only 2 system landscape)

We have tape drives attached to R/3 DEV and PRD and also BI PRD

Now

My idea is:

I am asking them to have 3X6 separate tapes in which 6 tapes for each box (R3 Dev, R3 PRD and BI PRD)

Which they will use in this fashion

1 tape for daily back-up

1 tape for every week backup X four weeks (1 month)

1 tape for monthly backup X every month

1 tape for yearly backup X every year

This is will repeat every day, week, month and year…

I hope i am clear on my explanation..

I also want to understand when should we take OFFLINE and ON LINE backups.

I request all the experts to please comment on this…

We are on

ECC6.0

Ms SQL 2005

Windows 2003 server.

Thanks and regards

Hari Haran.V

[Former Member]

Hi Harry,

You must take back up of PRD's both R/3,BI on daily basis, on weekends(one day) take offline backup. Ok keep monhly and yearly as well.

For DEV boxestry to have atleas twice or thrice in a week or depending on the usage. If still development work is active try to have more regular backup.

Regards,

Hari.

[Former Member]

Dear Shantanu and Experts,

I thank you for your very quick and imformative reply, yes it helped me understand a lilttle about when we can take offline and online backups.

But can you also help me about the strategy i need to suggest them its pretty urgent for us.

And i request all the other experts to comment on my plan of action and give me better suggestions.

Waiting for your reply...

Points for sure..

Thanks in advance

Harry...

[Former Member]

And regarding tapes, Harry I would like to add that one of our customer is using Quantum DLT 7000 tape system. They are pretty satisfied with performance. So please check out the website "google".

regards, Shantanu

[Former Member]

Hi Hari,

I am not sure about hardware (tapes) part, but offline backup should be taken only when it does not hamper business transactions as expected. I belive only your customer will be able to tell you the time and frequency.

Same applies to online partly. It should be taken at night when system load is minimal, so that end users working on your systems do not have longer wait times due to increased db activity. Furthermore, you can think about backing up non-PRD systems only once a week to save disk space.

In our landscapes, I've seen customer's going mostly for online backups, with one offline backup a month for very large and small landscpaes, both.

Also, please read about backup types like full/whole/incremental to suit your needs.

Hope that helped to some extent.

regards, Shantanu