how do you do large scale backup/restores?

I know theres a few people lurking here who have userbases in the thousands. I'm curious how people are handling large scale backups and restores.

Currently we're doing a full once a week and incremental every other day. I back up the backups to tape every night too.

I'm growing concerned about the size of our backups though. What do you do in this scenario

1. Your backup is now 500 gigs
2. You need to restore an account from 2 months ago, the backup for that is on tape
3. In order to restore that one account, you have to restore the 500GB zimbra backup first, which from tape would take forever

I know that you can move to a backup system where certain accounts are backed up on certain days, but you could still wind up needing to restore a few hundred gigs just to restore a single account.

I'm considering looking at some of those data de-duplication backup systems, as I think they would work well for zimbra backups where you're going to be backing up the same data quite often.

Clearly define your policy....

We keep 30 days of Zimbra disk backups....so that is as far back as we will go for a user and restores are easy.

The only reason we push the backups off to tape is for disaster recovery. We will not go back to tape for a user's data unless the situation is extraordinary. The tapes are only there in case the server blows up.

So for us....user backups only come off disk....tapes are for disaster recovery only.

Buy more disks if you need to keep more data for longer. It's cheaper and much less of a headache in the long run.

Matt

As most IT people can relate, we're often exptected to do the impossible (especially if they sign the checks). so like if someone says 'hey i had this folder i deleted last year and I really need it back" or situations like that.

In the long term i estimate our zimbra store to reach almost 1tb. maybe our 1 full backup a week should be changed to 1 full backup a month. that way, wtih probably 1.5 tb of backup space we could probably store the month full and a month worth of incrementals nightly. Then it has to be a pretty damn important restore to make us restore a backup from a previous month from tape.