Backup works for 1 week only

Here is my issue. Four of our clients servers will backup after a week of backups.We use DAT drives and DDS drives and we use the MS utility backup to create our backup schemes. We set the tapes to overwrite whatever tapes is in there to backup onto. So we have 4 tapes for the week and 1 for each friday. Now when i first start the rotation, in the device manager i mark all the tapes as free. The first week everything backs up fine, however the next week it will not rewrite over the tapes. I have to go and deallocate and free the tapes again for them to be able to backup. What suggestions do you have to eliminate this?
Some of our clients have the same setup with Server2003, same have same drives, and it works but on some servers that tapes will not backup after they have been backed up once. No there are no write protect tabs on these tapes.

Thanks.
Windows Server 2003 Standard no SP1

 

So if I understand this correctly you're doing incrementals Monday thru Thursday and a Full Backup on Friday?

How many tapes in the Rotation?

 

should i do incremental?
the tapes are doing full backups full overwite each night.

 

If you don't run 24 X 7 (which you appear not to) and have plenty of tapes, I'd recommend that you run a full backup each time. All incremental backs save you is time. If you have all night to back up, the time saved isn't worth the hassle of working back through incremental backups to restore your data.

I can highly recommend BackupAssist. It is a cheap software application that sits on top of MS backup and sorts out the scheduling and reporting of backups. It will also handle the tape rotation for you. I think it will sort out the problem you are having.

 

Here is some good reading on Tape Backup Methods.

http://www.seagate.com/products/tapesales/backup/A2g1.html

I'm afraid I'm not much help on using the NT Backup utility. If it was a decent backup utility Veritas wouldn’t be getting close to 600 bucks for their backup utility without any modules added like Exchange which is another 500.

If you ever had a disaster recovery on a mission critical server I doubt NT Backup would be your first choice.

 

The engine used by Windows 2000 and 2003 server is Backup Exec. It is a cut down version. What you get for the 600 bucks is the enhanced scheduling tools, application plug-ins (see below), the open file back up facility, and disaster recovery.

The application plug-ins allow you to fully back up that application without shutting it down. Also they give you enhance functionality: for example the Exchange plug-in allow you to backup and restore at the mailbox level.

Veritas Backup Exec is good I believe, but you have to pay for it. It is also not perfect - you can have fun if the person who changes the tape, puts the wrong tape in (the result being an error message and no backup that night). As the tape changing is often done by none-IT admin staff, this can happen very often!

If you have a situation where you are running continously day and night, and/or you need to get a server back on line in a hour or two, then Veritas Backup Exec is a great solution.

However, my belief is that most small businesses don't need that level of backup. Spending a whole day rebuilding a system is acceptible for most of the businesses I've worked with. Also most of them have their ISP hosting their internet websites and holding their e-mail, so they only need server services during the working day.

For many small business, windows backup managed by backupassist is a great solution. Especially if they have Win2003 with shadow copy enabled.

 

Thanks for all your help!