Hi all

I have seen a lot about slow restores on this group but had first class
experience on this last week. A hard disk in one our file servers crashed.
It is a 8.4 Gig drive with compression turned on which gave us approx 12gig
of data that needed to be restored. We have done a lot of directory and SQL
database restores and have been able to restore 25gig in +- 2 hours. Because
this is a medium shop we currently use one DLT 2700 auto library for the
backups.
We take daily incremental backups which we keep for 60 days and a full
monthly backup which are kept for 2 years.

The disk crashed on Monday morning and a full backup was taken on the
Sunday. We started the restore of all active files and directories and the
first tapes that were used to backup the node was recalled. We mounted 83
cartridges and it took 29 hours to restore the drive.

Our backup server is running NT and the client is NT as well. ADSM is on V3.
The backup server hardware config is dual P11 350 with 512MB ram. The time
constraint in this case was library. I calculated that the actual data
transfer time was about two hours and the rest of the time was checkin and
out as well as search times.

A bigger magstar or ATL library is in our long term strategy but management
has asked me to investigate other possibilities off decreasing the restore
times.

Why did ADSM rebuild the drive from a total of 83 tapes and not from the
monthend backup tape. Would a point in time restore have made a difference.I
thought that a restore of the active files would go back to when the last
backup of that file was taken.

We have been on ADSM for about a year and a half but this was the first time
we needed to restore a whole user directory(46000 files).

Our biggest file server consists of about 280 000 files and I don't know how
long this will take.

Any suggestions on this? Our full monthly backup is run with a different
policy set and according to backup stats do backup 99% of the files on the
drive, but it did not ask for the monthly tape during the restore.


Johan Gouws
Johang AT hollard.co DOT za <mailto:Johang AT hollard.co DOT za>