Re: [Veritas-bu] Ideal Netbackup solution for backing up millions of fil

Hi,

You could try to use some sort of zip utility to combine all the files and directory structure into a single file. This will still take up time and resources on the system but it would make backups much quicker. There are better ideas, though.

NetBackup has a relatively new feature called Accelerator that might be able to use if you have NBU appliances or a vendor who supports this through OST. This is good for low change rate scenarios.

VADP would allow you to do a snapshot backup of the entire VM with NetBackup, this would be much faster. There are other requirements, but it definitely would work well.

Flashbackup may take just as long as it has to backup the entire raw device, including any blank space on the filesystem, but it would also work.

Another consideration would be for Synthetic Backups. You would still lose a lot of time as the filesystem reads the files to be backed up and compares any changes. This is good for low change rate scenarios.

I believe all of these will require a license to enable and they may require testing to see which one works best in your situation.

I hope that helps,

Rusty

On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 2:43 PM, Shaheensn <nbu-forum AT backupcentral DOT com> wrote:

Hi,

It would be extremely helpful if the expert minds in this forum could help me with below concerns related to backing up data using Symantec NetBackup.

Background

Our system has a folder containing millions of small files spread across 1000s of sub folders running into more than 500GB that needs to be backed up on a daily basis. The backup usually starts end of day and is ideally supposed to finish before users start accessing the system the following day. However, the current backup using Symantec Netbackup takes lot of time and hence, this impacts the system performance. I assume this is because of the current backup approach used by Symantec is based on file-level backup.

The current backup policy has a monthly full backup, weekly differential backup and daily incremental backup. However, the daily backup itself takes more than double the desired time. Symantec client version is 7.6.02.The server is a physical server having Windows Server 2003. The drive is dedicated to storing the files.

I am looking for a solution that would provide the fastest backup in order to ensure that backups are completed before users start accessing the system in the morning.

1. What is the best approach for backing up millions of small files spread across 1000s of folders using Symantec Netbackup?
2. I understand that flash backup feature in Symantec uses block-level backup and this would be ideal approach since there are lot of files involved?
3. What are the disadvantages of using Symantec Flashbackup feature?
4. Does installing Symantec SAN client without having fiber channel offer any improvement in backup speed? I read on some forums that you should use SAN client only if there is fiber channel support.
5. Would moving applications to Virtual Machines hosted on Vmware environment provide any improvement.

PS: Backups are not my domain of expertise and hence, I would like to apologize in advance if I have mentioned something absurd. Secondly, changing the application file structure is not an option :(

Cheers,

Shaheen

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Rusty Major ▪ Manager - Compute Engineering, Backup and Storage ▪ Sungard Availability Services
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Re: [Veritas-bu] Ideal Netbackup solution for backing up millions of files