Backup Options Please

Hi All

I need thoughts and opinions with our backups

We use backup exec and backup to LT04 tape.

Nightly we do, AD, All Student, staff and shrares folders, MIS/eportal.

This takes between 20-24 hours to complete. About 1.27tb

Been thinking how to improve this. Moving to Decrimental backup but cant do a full week with out a problem atm.

Would backing up to disk (ie to a nas box) then to tape be faster?
How would the restore work? can you do it from tape back to a students area?

Any Thoughts please or advice?

Tar

Feebs

If you do D2D2T then most restores are done from the NAS/SAN back to your server.

Ben

do a nightly incremental and a once a week full backup over the weekend when there's more time for it to complete.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by browolf

do a nightly incremental and a once a week full backup over the weekend when there's more time for it to complete.

---

was looking at de-crimental as with incrimental if one fails your whole weeks messed (is that right??)

its just waiting to get this full backup as that 40+ hours and we not got a working one of them yet either

:mad:

just wanted to know if the disk idea would be any better?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by plexer

If you do D2D2T then most restores are done from the NAS/SAN back to your server.

Ben

---

but you know students 4-5 days later they come back. would it need to restore to nas first? or can you get a file direct off tape after d2d2t is done?

If you size the NAS/SAN correctly you'll have days/weeks/months of archives on there it's not just scratch space while you offload to tape normally allthough it could be.

Ben

I do:

Weekly Full D2D
Weekly Full D2T
Daily Differential D2D

Backup Exec handles all this, gets data from all the servers and stores it on a NAS/SAN for the full and daily D2D, then does a separate (we don't do D2D2T currently, although our SAN does support NDMP) backup job to the tape autoloader on the weekend.

Our full tape backup takes 24h50m for 1.3TB, full D2D takes 16h30m for 1.1TB. Tape includes verify, disk doesn't.

As plexer said, if you do D2D2T then you should have enough room on the second 'D' to handle your general restore needs and you only need the 'T' for disaster recovery or archival restores.

Not sure what decremental backups are or how they differ from incremental backups - why not just use differential backups? Much less to worry about and easier to restore the latest data. :)

Cheers,
Chris

hmm our weekly D2D backup takes 20-30hrs for 350gb

Ouch, what hardware you using?

Our backup server is a standard Dell rack box, essentially uses 1Gb NIC for data coming from the network, and 1Gb NIC for data going out to the NetApp FAS2020 backup SAN over iSCSI.

Chris

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Duke

Ouch, what hardware you using?

Our backup server is a standard Dell rack box, essentially uses 1Gb NIC for data coming from the network, and 1Gb NIC for data going out to the NetApp FAS2020 backup SAN over iSCSI.

Chris

---

its a proliant ML350 G4p with a ulta 320 scsi array and 1gb lan connection.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by browolf

its a proliant ML350 G4p with a ulta 320 scsi array and 1gb lan connection.

---

Weird, any idea where the bottleneck might be? Your local SCSI disks should be faster than my network-attached SATA disks! :)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Duke

Weird, any idea where the bottleneck might be? Your local SCSI disks should be faster than my network-attached SATA disks! :)

---

there's other some other backups going on, on that system that amount to 630GB in 641,000 files!
which is causing the drive to be badly fragmented ~60%

But I can't just stop all the backups to deal with it. Pondering solutions atm.

Hmm, time to find some budget for external storage that doesn't use NTFS or FAT32! ;)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by browolf

there's other some other backups going on, on that system that amount to 630GB in 641,000 files!
which is causing the drive to be badly fragmented ~60%

But I can't just stop all the backups to deal with it. Pondering solutions atm.

---

Make sure you haven't got indexing or compression on the drive you're backing up to.

I have 2 jobs going, B2D then B2T