For this System we use 20  Backup Tapes; divided as follows:

4 Daily Tapes

4 Weekly Tapes

12 Monthly Tapes.

How to Label Daily and Weekly Tapes:

Daily Tapes: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday

Weekly Tapes: Friday1, Friday2, Friday3, Friday4

*Do not label rest of the tapes at this stage.

Daily Tapes: We use these for Daily Differential Backups Monday - Thursday.

Weekly Tapes: We use these every Friday to do a Full Backup.

Monthly Tapes: After last Friday of each month we take Friday Tape off-site and re-label it to January, February, March... etc. We then take one of the new tapes and label this with the same name as the tape removed from Site

Some of the months have 5 Fridays. E.g. August 2008 is a five Friday month. In this case on the fifth Friday of the month we would use the next Friday Tape in the queue. As we can see in the table below on 29 of August we used Friday1 Tape. Next Monday we will label this tape as August and we will keep it off-site or in a fire proof safe. We would then take a new tape and label this as Friday1. Next friday (5 Sept) we will use Friday2 tape as it is next in rotation queue.

Table1. Example Tape Rotation August 2008.

Using This system You will be able to recall backups over a longer period.

1,2,3,4, days(with daily backups).

1,2,3,4 weeks(with full backups).

1,2,3,... 11,12 months(with monthly tapes)

You should use a spreadsheet for each month describing which tape was used each day and if backup was successful.

See Example Below;

Company Name: Your Company Name

Month: August