What about Synthetic Backups in Netbackup?  We are still using 4.5, so I
don't have any experience, but if feature does what the marketing says
it does, then that would get you closer to your goal of having 1 file
that just tracks changes only and is much more efficient in terms of
disk space...

Again, looking for anyone who has experience, they may not work at all,
or may work great.  I am not trying to promote Veritas/NetBackup, just
curious if anyone is using these...

Below is a blurb on synthetic backups...

Synthetic backup. When system availability requirements do
not allow enough time to complete a full backup, administrators
can create a synthetic backup that is identical to a current full
backup. A synthetic backup assembles data from the system's previous
full backup and subsequent incremental backups without involving network
resources-the synthetic backup is completed on the media server. The
ability to create synthetic backups can help administrators meet
regulatory or SLA requirements for frequent full backups when performing
actual archival backups over the network is too expensive or
resource-intensive.

To create a synthetic backup, selected data is copied from the
initial full backup and subsequent incremental backups to disk or
tape as a single backup image. To construct a synthetic backup
optimized for high-performance recovery operations, the VERITAS
NetBackup software tracks not only which files were present on the
volume for each backup, but also which data was moved or deleted
since the last full backup. A diskbased approach can dramatically
increase the usability and efficiency of synthetic backups. For
example, using disk storage for smaller, more frequent incremental
backups can help administrators reduce, if not eliminate, the
requirement to mount a large number of tapes.

-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-admin AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-admin AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of Sto
Rage(c) 
Sent: Friday, October 15, 2004 10:29 AM
To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Fwd: [Veritas-bu] Backups to disk

Well, for one it uses the disks as virtual tape and dumps these large
image files for every job. So you end up needing as many TB of disk
space as you needed tapes. You cannot afford to keep a month's worth of
data on disk, at least not for us. We have 12 TB of storage that needs
to be backed up every day.
Have you seen products from Data Domain or NetApp's SnapVault ? These
are nice but even these force you to use their disks arrays. 
Wish there was a software or an appliance that would allow you to
attach any disk
array you want but will intelligently compress your backups such that
they keep only one instance of a file and keep track of just the
changed fragments.
-G
BTW, I don't work for either of these companies.



On Thu, 14 Oct 2004 21:19:52 -0400 (EDT), Steve Quan <sq01 AT yorku DOT ca>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Can you explain why (re:efficency) ?
>
> Thanks,
> /Steve
> ---
>
>
> On Thu, 14 Oct 2004, [ISO-8859-1] Sto Rage(c)  wrote:
>
> > We have a lot of ATABoy and ATABeast units. But none of them are
being
> > used with Veritas for disk backups. We use them for online archives.
> > We think Veritas's backup to disk is an inefficient solution.
> >
> > -G
> >
> >
> >
> > On Thu, 14 Oct 2004 19:32:02 -0400, dyankowski AT cits.canon DOT com
> > <dyankowski AT cits.canon DOT com> wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > Anyone every use a Nexsan ATABoy with Veritas?
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > >
> > > Dan
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Veritas-bu maillist  -  Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
> > > http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
> > >
> > _______________________________________________
>
>
> > Veritas-bu maillist  -  Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
> > http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
> >
>

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