Backing up CIFS shares - is there a best practice document?

[ak]

Hi All,

I have a FAS2020 and I've been backing up my CIFS shares via NDMP with Backup Exec.

I initially tried to backup the CIFS shares directly but the performance was woefully slow and it wouldn't fit the backup window.

I've got some concerns with NDMP in-so-far that the data has to be restored to an NDMP device of the same family - so if our FAS-2020 exploded - we'd need to restore to another NetApp filer.

How do you backup your CIFS data?

I'm backing up the entire volumes and the snapshot folders - is that the correct thing to do? or do I not need to backup the snapshot folders? (I'm assuming that this is useful for historical purposes!).

Thanks,

Ant

[VKALVEMULA]

setup in such a way that you take 1 or 2 full backups / week and on remaining days set up as incremental backups.