Hello,

I have recently been assigned the task of taking care of company-wide backups due to a shuffle in the structure of our company. Unfortunately, this is not an area that I have had a lot of experience in. Our previous system was a very simple series of ntbackup scripts that ran every day and stored data on our SAN. As our company has grown it has become clear that this approach is unreliable and inflexible, so I'm going about setting up a system that uses BE 12.5.

After reading a considerable amount of documentation and looking around online I am still quite confused about a few concepts that are preventing me from implementing a simple backup scheme -- it is essential that I have at least a rudimentary regime in place shortly and I am struggling to get one set up. 

Here is a little information about our network environment:

• The intended storage space for the backups is a 2TB LUN on our SAN;
• Our organisation consists for a mixture of virtualised and physical Windows Server 2003 and 2008 machines;
• Amongst the services that I need to have backed up are Exchange 2007, SQL 2005, ISA 2006 and several SPS (sharepoint services) servers;
• The servers that are virtualised are using ESX 3.5 (VMWare Infrastructure);

Here is my question:

Is there a good, comprehensive guide to setting up a simple backup regime that I could use to set up an initial, basic backup regime for the machines on our network? Failing that, is there a good place I can start in terms of documentation for setting up series of rotating backups? What I am hoping to have set up to start with is something like this--

• Daily differential backups of core services running from Mon-Friday every week, with last week's days being overwritten on Monday.
• A full backup of all data and services taken every Saturday on a 8 week rotation for 8 total backups going back 2 months.

To start with, all of these backups would simply be stored on the SAN. I have a tape library, but currently we do not have licensing options to use it with Symantec. Working on that.

Any advice or help greatly appreciated!

-Julian Lancaster