Thanks Sonny and all who have replied. I'm still unclear about two things.

  1 Is NBU's performance detrimentally effected when backing up lots
    of small files over a view large ones?

  2 A few of you suggest that Multi Streaming to a single Volume is a
    good thing to do. Whilst not wanting to sound argumentitive my
    observation is that this will surely cause disk thrashing and
    consequently always cause the backup to be slower ie single stream
    to same disk will always be faster than multiple stream.

Any comments,

George


>From: "Sonny Chee" <schee AT winstar DOT com>
>Reply-To: <schee AT winstar DOT com>
>To: "George Roper" <backup_user AT hotmail DOT com>,        
><veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu>
>Subject: RE: [Veritas-bu] Lots of files: Backup Performance
>Date: Tue, 16 May 2000 11:29:42 -0400
>
>Is your DLT7000 directly attached to your master server? And
>are you doing streaming? You can split up the directories under
>the same file system and each directory will split up as
>one stream. You could also split the files up by drives
>to make your reads more efficient. Streaming will be more efficient
>and reduce the wear and tear on your tape drive.
>
>
>Sonny Chee
>System Administration
>Winstar Communication
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: veritas-bu-admin AT Eng.Auburn DOT EDU
> > [mailto:veritas-bu-admin AT Eng.Auburn DOT EDU]On Behalf Of George Roper
> > Sent: Tuesday, May 16, 2000 7:51 AM
> > To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
> > Subject: [Veritas-bu] Lots of files: Backup Performance
> >
> >
> > How does NBU perform when asked to backup a lot of small files within 
>the
> > same filesystem?
> >
> > I have need to backup 1,600,000 files averaging 2-3k each - total
> > of 30GB of
> > data. My backup to a single DLT7000 tape unit currently takes ~50 hours.
> >
> > Theorectically if the system were able to drive the DLT at 5MB/s
> > this should
> > take 100 minutes. NBU obviously has lots of overhead when
> > recording to the
> > Files Database each of these 1,600,000 files. Also the backup
> > process must
> > slow when walking the directory to determine what file to backup next.
> >
> > Before I start tuning this environment I would like to know what is a
> > reasonable backup window to expect.
> >
> > Anyone any experience or observations?
> >
> > George
> > ________________________________________________________________________
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> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Veritas-bu maillist  -  Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
> > http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
> >
>

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