Fast(backup) what about fast recovery??

[dburress]

I'm doing my first full system recovery today. A modest 250GB of data needs to be restored. I'm thinking this will be no problem at all. However, I'm being proved wrong. The data size isn't all that large, but there are hundreds of thousands of very small tiff files. Conservative estimates giving the total data size, and the current size of the restored files we are talking about 24 hours +... Not what I had in mind.

My #1 problem is the disk of the target is smaller than the source disk (dead raid array, and so old of server it cannot be repaired). So i'm using fastback mount and xcopy. I assume that a volume level restore is much faster. I see the CPU of the target spike up pretty high during the restore. Anyone have any experience in speeding up the recovery time using fastback mount?

Any advise on how to speed this up would be greatly appreciated. I do not have Fastback BMR. I am trying to recovery the data drive only. Nothing too fancy.

Thanks,

Dewayne

 

[moon-buddy]

My two cents:

Most probably this will be it! If you have NOT enabled collocation, you will be hit by multiple tape mounts which will slow things down even more.

In other words, sit this one out for the whole 24 hours.

 

[dburress]

Thanks for the reply but this is fastback 6.1.2, its just pulling the data from the disk repo. I think the speed of the virtual mount volume is the problem.

Either way, the recovery process is still running...so your right, I think I'm just going to have to be patient. But I can't have this slow of a recovery next round.

 

[mccleld]

This does sound very painful, but I'm not too surprised if you're copying file by file using xcopy - a volume level restore will certainly be much faster as this works at the block level rather than individual file level. You could also try FastBack's instant restore for instant availability of your restore dataset while the actual copy/restore takes place in the background - but I presume that your issue here that your target volume is smaller so that this won't work, right...?
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David Mc
London, UK

 

[dburress]

This does sound very painful, but I'm not too surprised if you're copying file by file using xcopy - a volume level restore will certainly be much faster as this works at the block level rather than individual file level. You could also try FastBack's instant restore for instant availability of your restore dataset while the actual copy/restore takes place in the background - but I presume that your issue here that your target volume is smaller so that this won't work, right...?
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David Mc
London, UK

David,

Thanks for your reply. I've not had the chance to confirm a block level restore but I assumed the speed would be comparable to that of a full backup. You are correct; the instant restore, and volume restore options are both unavailable. What disturbs me about this is that the actual data size is of course smaller than the target disk. Hopefully they will come out with a re-size option in the future so you can restore the data to a smaller volume. Either way, its a good lesson to learn. I will make sure I have the same size or larger in the future. The restore by the way did take nearly 24 hours to complete. The best news is no data was lost!

 

[mccleld]

(ignore what I wrote here - re-reading your original post I see you've tried a variation on this already! Lesson: make sure you reread the whole thread!)
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David Mc
London, UK

 

[dburress]

Just an update, I did a successful DR test using the volume level recovery. I was very happy with its performance.