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I have installed IBM DDS4 DAT drive in my server to automate backup. The server operating system is Windows 2000 with SP4. I would like to know how to automate backup and what tape media is required. The server runs 24 x 7 hours. In the night, after 10 p.m., there is no user activity in the server.

Muralidaran R

In Windows, there is a utility for Backup and Restore called NTBACKUP. This is meant to Backup the required files and the system state. You can also restore files with the same utility.

The output file will be of the format *.bkf. The backup can be configured as a wizard, allowing you to do a step-by-step configuration. You can backup the entire files in your computer or only the necessary files.

The destination can be directly to the tape drive or to a disk. Then from the disk you can copy to the tape media. The maximum capacity of the DDS4 tape is 40GB. If you schedule your backup to late night hours and if the tape is full and prompting to put a new tape, and you fail to do that, the backup might fail.

To avoid such a scenario, the backup can be scheduled to write on a disk. During daytime, you can push the data to the tape.

Before starting the backup, you need to plan for the backup activity. The planning is for the files and folders to be backed up, the type of backup incremental, differential or full, how many older versions of the backup you want to maintain, meaning how many days you want to preserve that day's backup.

If you are going for an incremental backup daily, it is good to have a full backup once a week or once in 15 days. This will make the restoration process easier.

It is enough if you restore the recent old full backup and the next successive incremental backups.

Another important thing that you have to preserve, along with each tape, is the file systems that were backed up, the date of backup, the type of backup, incremental or full.

Once the backup data has expired, you can reuse the tape.

Solution by P. Natarajan

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