Hello, I'm new to BackupExec and I'm just starting to plan my backup schedule/retention policy. From the videos I've seen it appears that running occasional full backups with regular incremental/differential backups in between seems to be the recommended method. My concern is that this will require, at a minimum, at least twice as much capacity on your backup server as the amount of data you want to backup.
My questions is, what would be the downside to running 1 full backup that is held forever and then only running differential backups that expire every few weeks? It seems to me that this would save on disk space as you'll never need two full copies of the data on your backup server. Are there major downsides to this? My biggest concern would be that the integrity of the full backup remains. If anything were to happen to that backup you'd be screwed. Is this the reason an occasional full backup is recommended? Does everyone out there have over twice as much space on their backup server as the size of the data they're backing up?
I came from Retrospect which had a feature similar to this. One full backup was done and from then on only differential backups were made. Retrospect would then groom the backup set to remove differential backups older than your specified retention period. Granted, it didn't really work and constantly threw errors during the grooming process (I really hate Retrospect now) but it was an option for when you were low on backup disk space. I guess I'm just wondering if BackupExec has something similar to this that actually works.
Thanks for your help and time.
Shawn