On Wed, 29 Oct 2003, Steve Mickeler wrote:

>
> I'm looking for any feedback from those who are actively using FlashBackup
> to find out if its worth the price.
>
> After doing some research, it seems that for one of our servers that has
> close to 30 Million files , most of them quite small, that the FlashBackup
> extension might be the best tool to reduce the backup windows on this
> server.
>
Steve,

We've been using FlashBackup for just a few months to solve a similar
issue (in a much smaller setup), but it seems to work beautifully.  We
have a mailserver with about 10 million small files on it.  I started
looking for other solutions once our full backups started spanning
20-26 hours (just a single stream, no multiplexing).

FlashBackup cut the backup time for our fulls in half, and our dailies
to a quarter of the time they took without FlashBackup.

The one caveat with FlashBackup is that the speed you gain in backups
can become a penalty when doing restores.  Since it's doing essentially
a raw partition backup, the files are scattered all over the tape more
than with a filesystem backup.  If you are restoring a number of different
files, you may have to wait quite awhile for the restore to seek to each
of the files.  If you do a lot of restores, you might consider staging
to disk.

That being said, if you have a ton of small files, FlashBackup is really
the way to go.

Take care,

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Casey Feskens <cfeskens AT willamette DOT edu>
System Administrator/Network Svcs. Consultant
Willamette University, Salem, OR
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