On 15 jan 2009, at 15:26, John C Dury wrote:

I have two separate Windows 2003 boxes both running running  v5.5.1.10
client that are both failing their incrementals every night. Both of
these
boxes have hundreds of thousand of files all spread into multiple
directories. In fact, each day, a new directory is created and then
multiple subdirectories are created under it and thousand of files
in each
of those subdirectories. The reason I say this is because I don't
think it
is a candidate for multiple virtual nodes because of the new
directories
that are created every day.

I do have journaling turned on although it doesn't seem to help with
the
large number of files either as when I run an incremental
manually,it takes
forever and never seems to finish.

are you sure that the journal is running and has enough space? In
these cases, having the journals on a separate filesystem might be a
very good idea. I have the feeling that there is not enough space for
the TSM journal database...

I thought about doing image backups of the drive where the thousands
of
files live but when I tried it, it backed up about 14g and then just
hung
and never continued. I had to cancel it after waiting for an hour or
so.

and to what type of storage do these images go? I'd think that in case
of an image backup you'd want a management class that makes them go
directly to tape. My guess is that these were going to disk volumes?

What is my best strategy for dealing with these two boxes that are
generating thousands of new files in new directories every day? The
huge
number of objects in the TSM DB are starting to cause quite a few
problems
with daily processing also as expiration is running longer and
longer since
I think it is choking on the number of objects.

I'd say that image backups are a good idea in cases of very active
filesystems. Filesystems on windows with huge numbers of files are
always a cause of problems, not only with TSM.

And to make it even weirder, they both fail incrementals at night
and the
only error I can find is:

ANR0481W Session 16603 for node <SERVERNAME> (WinNT) terminated
- client did not respond within 9000 seconds. (SESSION:
16603)

meaning that indeed the client is indeed choking on the size of the
directories.

I'm starting to think that TSM is just not the backup solution for
either
of these boxes.

I'm also thinking that if you have a piece of software creating 1000's
of files per day in a filesystem, that this is a very big workload.
I'm very sure that with VSS snapshots and image backups, you are on
the right track and no other product could do a better job of backing
up these filesystems.

--

Remco Post
r.post AT plcs DOT nl
+31 6 24821 622