Backing up the most valuable information is inevitable basis of any corporate disaster recovery plan. To optimize an effectiveness of your plan it's necessary to store the data as long as it possible, while using the least number of media storages.
No one who knows a way to have only few tapes and use them effectively wants to pay for tons of tapes waiting uselessly in an expensive off-site storage. Tapes for backup usually could be hardly considered as moderate cost solution. And quite the same thing with secure storage space prices.
There are several ways in which one can organize
backup rotation. The most known and popular are four backup schedules: simple incremental backup, Round Robin effective in weekly rotation, Grandfather-Father-Son also known as GFS and Tower of Hanoi based on mathematical puzzle. We already described all of them in previous articles. But today we are going to talk a bit about GFS backup strategy pros and cons.
Here is an example of how to perform GFS backup rotation in the most cost-effective way. To execute following rotation schedule you will need:
- 4 Daily or "Son" tapes
- 3 Weekly or "Father" tapes
- 1 Monthly or "Grandfather" tape