Example 5. Backing up to tapes within a narrow backup window

This example assumes that you are using an advanced edition of Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5.

Consider the following scenario:

• You want to back up servers every workday after working hours.
• You want to do a monthly full backup on one of the workdays, and partial (incremental or differential) backups on the other workdays.
• You want to store the backups on a tape library.
• The backup window for the servers is narrow, so they cannot be backed up to the tapes directly.

In this scenario, install Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5 Storage Node and create two managed vaults: one on a hard disk local to the storage node, and another on the tape library locally attached to it.

Create a centralized backup plan for all of the machines with the Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS) scheme. When creating the backup plan, specify the vault on the hard disk in the Path field. Under Backup type, select Full/Incremental/Differential.

For the primary location, in Keep backups, choose to keep monthly backups for one month (you need to clear the Keep indefinitely check box). This way, the vault will serve as an intermediate, short-term storage for the backups.

Select the Replicate just created backup to another location check box, and then specify the vault on the tape library in the 2nd location field. For the second location, select to keep monthly backups indefinitely.

Result:

• Agents back up their machines to the vault on the hard disk.
• The storage node copies the backups to the tape device. No CPU resource from the machines is taken.
• The lifetime of backups on the hard disk does not exceed one month. On the tape library, the monthly backups are kept indefinitely.