Backup Options Please

[fil_b]

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

[plexer]

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

 

Ben

[browolf]

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

[fil_b]

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

 

 

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

[fil_b]

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?

[plexer]

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

[Duke]

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

[browolf]

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

[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

[browolf]

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.

[Duke]

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!

[browolf]

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.

[Duke]

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

[teejay]

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.

[IanT]

I have 2 jobs going, B2D then B2T

[srochford]

I think it's worth stepping back for a minute and asking "Why do I backup?" "What do I need to do with my backups?"

 

For example, is it disaster recovery: I get into work in the morning and find there's been a fire/flood/burglary/whatever and all my servers are dead

 

Is it "I've just deleted all my course work; please can you get back last night's backup?"

 

Or, "I want to go back to the version of files I had 3 weeks ago - please can you help?"

 

Can you use different backup techniques for different data sets? For example, if you say "we will only keep 1 week's worth of data for student home directories" then you could probably set up a box with a couple of 2Tb drives and use robocopy to copy to these. The benefit of that is that most of the data is static so once you've got a week's worth of backups in place, it takes much less time to do the backup each night because you're essentially doing a differential backup but with the benefit that the "Monday" folder holds all the files as they were on Monday so it's really quick to restore.

 

If you can do something like this, then you free up your tape system to do things like the SQL databases which need to be kept for longer and can't be backed up with robocopy.

 

You can configure your servers to backup system state to disc and then copy that off somewhere safe later - again, this might help spread the load.

 

Of course, this won't work for everyone (if you've got nowhere safe to put a disc backup which is a fire-safe distance from your servers then there's no point!) but sometimes just thinking about a complete change can help find a solution.

[mjs_mjs]

we have a NAS with an AIT autoloader attached. we do D2D2T;

Differential on all server except exchange and sims every night,

Full on exchange and sims every night,

Full on all servers at the end of every week(Friday).

 

Backup starts in the evening and takes a few hours most to do the backup to disk, replication to tape takes allot longer. we're currently borderline filling the 7 AIT3 tapes. Since installing the D2D2T we're never actually needed the tapes, there really only for disaster recovery now.