A general question about backup.

[igotacavity]

I have a general question about backups. Currently, there seems to be no way of scheduling an OD backup. So I asked the front desk person / assistant to do a backup through OD at the end of the day. It goes to a share, and I backup that share.

Now my issue is using NTBackup in windows XP to actually do that backup. NTBackup will make a backup just fine, but it has no way of expiring a backups, or any kind of retention period. All it has is append, or overwrite. There are two hard drives, and my intention is to keep backups for at least a month. Any advice on how other people on this board are doing this? I am thinking write a script which makes a backup using NTBackup every night and saves it as a different file name each time. Then, the same script should check dates on all files and delete backup files older than 1 month old.

Is keeping a backup for a month even necessary?

I know there is software like Backup Exec which will do retention periods and expire backup sets, but I just want opinions on what other people here are doing.

[jordansparks]

Standalone backup software is your best option for automated backup. I don't like the backup tool that comes with Windows because it compresses the backup into an undreadable file. Backup software should just copy to a new location. And yes, there are very good reasons to keep backups forever. Perhaps one snapshot per month or two. One thing you can do with old backups is compare them against a current database to look for patterns of embezzlement. Another thing you can do with them is to help prove that you didn't alter your chart notes.

[igotacavity]

Thank you for the advice. Looks like I will ditch NTBackup for a batch file, and use Xcopy or robocopy to copy the data.