Tivoli Continuous Data Protection

I had lunch with Mark Lewis of EMC this week. Well, me and about 20 other people did. Over lunch, we talked about lots of things but especially backup.

Maybe you'll remember back in October when I whined about my backups. It hasn't gotten any better. I did find out what was wrong with my DVD burners. They had dropped out of DMA mode from getting so many errors on my cheap media. I guess you get what you pay for.

Anyway, I am still tired of backing up EVERYTHING each month. And then I don't have a backup in between.

In the October post, I talked about IBM's VitalFile Backup. It has now come out of their skunkworks and is called Tivoli Continuous Data Protection - same function, just a new name.

I had some time this weekend so I installed it on my "server." So far it looks pretty good. It runs as a Java application and you interact with it through the browser.

When you start it up, it walks you through a wizard. I didn't screen shot that but here's a screen that shows you the choices you make about their "Continuous" backup:


I pointed it at my second internal hard drive and told it to use up to 50 GBs. It didn't use nearly that much (more later) but seemed to stop and start unless I gave it a really BIG number here.

Notice off to the right there's a list of inclusions. I generally took their defaults but probably should have thought more about all the Office extensions. I was amazed how much of those there were outside of My Documents that I didn't really care about. Oh, I deleted their "*.123" entry!

You go through pages setting up schedules (for remote backups) and exclusions. I left remote backups disabled for now and again pretty much took their defaults on exclusions.

Then you get the following "Backup everything now" screen. This takes a loooooong time. I ended up with about 12 GB backed up and it took 3-4 hours.


The remote backup they're talking about is a network or removable drive. Here's the configuration for it. As I mentioned, I have it disabled for now.


Finally, here's the startup screen when you hit it as http://localhost:9003/


You can see I have almost 29000 files protected by Tivoli CDP for almost 12 GB. My next challenge is to enable remote backup to a USB drive and keep it off site.