Macintosh file server backup is not fast enough

[Lars-Owe]

We're backing up a Macintosh-based fileserver with some 26 million files/24TB of data from a single file system. The system administrator isn't happy about the time it takes to do a full backup. Based on IBM:s tuning recommendations we suggested that the system administrator should try a backup based on 'incremental by date.' Unfortunately it took longer than a regular backup... Neither journal-based backups nor virtual mounting for a higher level of parallelism are available on the Mac.

dsmc incremental -incrbydate during the day:

Total number of objects inspected: 11,339,727
Total number of objects backed up: 5,721
Total number of objects updated: 0
Total number of objects rebound: 0
Total number of objects deleted: 0
Total number of objects expired: 0
Total number of objects failed: 0
Total number of bytes inspected: 6.66 TB
Total number of bytes transferred: 1.95 GB
Data transfer time: 49.03 sec
Network data transfer rate: 41,874.05 KB/sec
Aggregate data transfer rate: 121.61 KB/sec
Objects compressed by: 0%
Total data reduction ratio: 99.98%
Elapsed processing time: 04:41:24

Scheduled backup the night before:

03/10/2015 05:05:29 Total number of objects inspected: 11,346,170
03/10/2015 05:05:29 Total number of objects backed up: 37,213
03/10/2015 05:05:29 Total number of objects updated: 71,827
03/10/2015 05:05:29 Total number of objects rebound: 0
03/10/2015 05:05:29 Total number of objects deleted: 0
03/10/2015 05:05:29 Total number of objects expired: 2,196
03/10/2015 05:05:29 Total number of objects failed: 8
03/10/2015 05:05:29 Total number of bytes inspected: 6.71 TB
03/10/2015 05:05:29 Total number of bytes transferred: 7.66 GB
03/10/2015 05:05:29 Data transfer time: 192.94 sec
03/10/2015 05:05:29 Network data transfer rate: 41,679.98 KB/sec
03/10/2015 05:05:29 Aggregate data transfer rate: 653.38 KB/sec
03/10/2015 05:05:29 Objects compressed by: 0%
03/10/2015 05:05:29 Total data reduction ratio: 99.89%
03/10/2015 05:05:29 Elapsed processing time: 03:25:08
03/10/2015 05:05:29 --- SCHEDULEREC STATUS END
03/10/2015 05:05:29 --- SCHEDULEREC OBJECT END NIGHTLY 03/10/2015 02:30:00

Platform: Mac
Client OS Level: 10.8.5
Client Version: Version 6, release 4, level 0.0

Please advise.

 

[marclant]

With that many objects, the majority of the time is spend inspecting the filesystem to determine which file to backup. The resources used to perform this task are: CPU, disk and memory, so using faster components would result in faster inspection.

Anti-virus can slow down performance of the backup, if you use one, you could test without to see if there is an improvement. If you see an improvement, you could exclude files accessed by TSM from AV.

Other than that, there is no tuning in TSM to speed up the time it takes to do the inspection. If you had multiple filesystems, resourceutilization would help, but that's not your case.