Bare metal backup V conventional backup

[superatticman]

Am thinking of ways to improve the speed of our backup.

 

Quick overview of our network is about 30 virtual servers hosted on a SAN disk array. We use Vsphere as the host OS. And 6 physical servers.

 

Obviously for file and email servers, conventional backup is the way to go so as to be able to restore individual files or emails. However, would I be right in saying that a 'bare metal' vhd backup of the other servers would result in a much faster backup???

 

Would have thought writing 1 extremely large file rather than thousands of small, in some cases tiny files would give a much better throughput?

 

We use Arcserve 16.5 with an LT06 library.

[dhicks]

Obviously for file and email servers, conventional backup is the way to go so as to be able to restore individual files or emails.

 

If your email server is Exchange then you can set a retention period for deleted emails and accounts. For file servers, I would split the VM into two disk images - a smaller one for the OS and a larger one for the files themselves, that way you can backup and restore the OS partition separatly.

 

Would have thought writing 1 extremely large file rather than thousands of small, in some cases tiny files would give a much better throughput?

 

Good point - if you're syncing a disk image with a backup copy you'll be reading the source disk image in order and writing that data out in the same order, which is going to be quicker to write (no seeking back and forward, just a steady increment).

[superatticman]

I guess you could also look at filtering out files that are older than a certain period. I'm pretty sure Arcserve allows this as a filter option. Or maybe even filtering out files of a certain type that are a year old for example.

 

But if you are going to start excluding older stuff, then a solid tape retention strategy is going to be required just incase.