Backup times with Backup Exec

[fil_b]

Hi All

 

We currently have a full backup over the weekend and its taking around 40 hours to do 1.7TB of information from servers.

 

Our nightly backup of the staff and student areas is taking a number of hours also.

 

400gb for strudents takes 8 hours

250gb for staff takes round 5 hours

 

Is this normal with backup exec? and any other advice?

 

I am looking to change this to incrementals to make it go faster

 

Thanks

 

Phil

[danrhodes]

It will depend on what media you are backing up to, I use ultrilium 4 and can do a backup of 900GB in about 21 hours. At the weekend I do a backup of the same amount of data to a NAS box in a different building and it can start friday 3pm and not finish until monday morning at 6am!

 

D

[round2it]

sounds about correct to me

 

ours is on gigabit switch to speed things up a bit.

[fil_b]

sounds about correct to me

 

ours is on gigabit switch to speed things up a bit.

 

so is ours

 

We have HP switches with gigabit and fibers to the San

 

just shocked it takes so long

 

Also would incremental be faster in the week??

[spc-rocket]

Hi All

 

We currently have a full backup over the weekend and its taking around 40 hours to do 1.7TB of information from servers.

 

Our nightly backup of the staff and student areas is taking a number of hours also.

 

400gb for strudents takes 8 hours

250gb for staff takes round 5 hours

 

Is this normal with backup exec? and any other advice?

 

I am looking to change this to incrementals to make it go faster

 

Thanks

 

Phil

 

Hi,

 

Are you backing up the servers to disk first and then on to tape? If you are backing the servers to disk at the same time it will slow down the backup because 1) it is multiple server writing to the same set of disks and 2) they are all pulling the data from san (if you have a san).

 

It depends on what speed the disks are as well, SATA disks tends to be slower in RPM but offer larger disk capacity where as SCSI are faster but offer less disk space and SAS is similar to scsi although they are now starting to arrive in larger disk capacities.

 

 

Ash.

[localzuk]

so is ours

 

We have HP switches with gigabit and fibers to the San

 

just shocked it takes so long

 

Also would incremental be faster in the week??

 

Yes, Incremental would be faster - this is what we do here. There's no need to do full backups daily. All you need is a full backup once a week followed by a set of incremental backups each day.

 

Reduces the amount to backup hugely.

 

Only thing I can suggest for reducing backup times for you is to split your backup between 2 devices (assuming the data is not all on one server in the first place to backup from).

[teejay]

If you're backing up to disk or using disk as a staging device, then make sure you have compression and indexing turned off on the target disk.

[maniac]

Yes, Incremental would be faster - this is what we do here. There's no need to do full backups daily. All you need is a full backup once a week followed by a set of incremental backups each day.

 

Reduces the amount to backup hugely.

 

Only thing I can suggest for reducing backup times for you is to split your backup between 2 devices (assuming the data is not all on one server in the first place to backup from).

 

I've always used Differential backups as oppose to incremental ones - there's too much chance of data loss with incremental backups as you need the last full backup plus all the incrementals taken since for a full restore, whereas with differential backup you only ever need 2 tapes - the last full backup and the last differential backup.

 

I've just reviewed our backup procedure here, and we now have a nice LTO4 tape changer which completed it's first sucessful backup last night. Took about 3 1/2 hours to backup 450GB. which was a lot quicker than our old AIT3 changer which took practically a whole weekend to do the same.

 

Mike.

[localzuk]

I've always used Differential backups as oppose to incremental ones - there's too much chance of data loss with incremental backups as you need the last full backup plus all the incrementals taken since for a full restore, whereas with differential backup you only ever need 2 tapes - the last full backup and the last differential backup.

 

I've just reviewed our backup procedure here, and we now have a nice LTO4 tape changer which completed it's first sucessful backup last night. Took about 3 1/2 hours to backup 450GB. which was a lot quicker than our old AIT3 changer which took practically a whole weekend to do the same.

 

Mike.

 

Ah, it depends if you're doing it via D2D though. If you're using a D2D system, then the incrementals and the full are in the same place, so there's the same risk of loss as if you were using differentials.

[Modey]

We do a backups to two different tape drives each night. One uses Backup Exec 12.5 and backs up 100GB to an Ultrium 2 drive (admin & financial data). That takes about 50mins.

 

Our main backup for all of our servers is a touch over 2TB in total and takes about 10hrs. That's backed up using DPM2010RC to a Quantum Superloader 3 with a LTO4 drive.

 

Both tape drives are external SCSI.

[maniac]

Ah, it depends if you're doing it via D2D though. If you're using a D2D system, then the incrementals and the full are in the same place, so there's the same risk of loss as if you were using differentials.

 

True, I use a tape based system as I like the peace of mind of locking the tapes away in a fire proof safe, and storing one off site once a week - helps me sleep at night!