Why is my backup taking so long??

[maniac]

Our backup has recently started over running into the morning past when the kids start using the system. This morning it completed at 09:52, it starts at 6:00pm. It's taking waaay to long.

 

Looking at the logs, it seems to be our exchange server that is causing most of the problems. It's taking 8 hours of its time backing up exchange, which is only 83GB of data. Our total backup is over 500GB, so this is proportionally a long time.

 

Extract from the log

 

=======

Backed up 590810 mail messages in 6340 folders in 210 mailbox(es)

6 corrupt files were backed up

Processed 83,656,852,251 bytes in 8 hours, 2 minutes, and 20 seconds.

Throughput rate: 165 MB/min

=======

 

Our backup is done using backup exec 10, using the exchange plugin to backup exchange mailboxes directly. It does a full backup each night, I've had so many problems with incremental backups in the past I'm lothed to use them. Server is exchange 2003.

 

The servers are linked via a 4108GL switch, each server has a 2gbs connection via an HP teamed network card, which is working fine on both servers. Both servers are faily new and run effiecently in all other aspects.

 

Anyone got any ideas on how we can improve this time without asking staff to delete messages, as past experience shows we won't get much sucess if we asked.

 

Any suggestions welcome.

 

Mike.

[mattx]

Dare I say it ? Turn off any AV services that are running....

I found our backup completed quite a bit quicker after I ran a defrag on our servers too - not sure why.... [ we are using the O&O degrag software ]

[maniac]

Our sophos AV on access scanning is turned off already, and only does a scheduled scan once a week.

 

I've just done some googling and turned up this. http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/241858.htm which I think explains my problem quite well! lol.

 

Mike.

[DMcCoy]

You could always switch to the database backup instead. This will be much quicker, I've not bothered using the individual mailbox backup for ages as its a lot easier to recover stuff in 2003. It could well be slow because its backing up over half a million mail messages one at a time!

[Butuz]

Backing up 1000 small files that total 1gb will always take much much longer than backing up one big 1gb file. Individual emails are lots of small files so this is why your email backup is taking up a large proportion of your time.

 

One option would be to actualy back up your emails into a backup file (backup to disk) which will give you one large file that can be backed up to tape easily and quickly.

 

Butuz