SCREW THAT. Too much organizational overhead. When disaster strikes, you're never quite sure which tape contains which data. I simply do a full file-by-file backup of everything every night onto one tape. I pencil the date on that tape. The next night, I use the next tape. Simple.

Nooo! The proper way (TM) is to have your tapes numbered, and date (and any other appropriate data) for a particular tape written in the Little Red Notebook (R). That way you don't end up with 30 different dates written, half-erased and overwritten on a tiny label.

When somebody comes to me and asks to have a file restored, all I need from them is the file name and the date. I find the tape with that date, stick the tape in, grab the file, and I'm done.

Sure, incremental backups allow the backups to finish quicker, but the simplicity and ease of recovery, to me, is worth the extra time and expense of full backups.

And the DLT drives/tapes we're using can handle it, both in terms of duty cycle and capacity. They have been dead-reliable for years now.

The only drawback is that after about a year's worth of over-and-over uses, a given DLT cartridge will need to be replaced. I just wait until a given cartridge reports an error, then I swap a new one in its place.

OK, my experiance is mostly from banking transactional database backup, where one cannot afford to loose a single transaction and logs go continuously to tapes. Typical fileservers are backed up the way you describe.

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green