You said the file system is NFS mounted.  Does that mean there is a NAS server?

To go fast with millions of files you either have to journal or do a block 
level backup.

If the file system is owned by a dedicated NAS device NDMP may be the answer.  
If the file system is owned by an OS that can journal then that is an option.  
If the file system is owned by a virtual server then an image backup from the 
host is an option.

Andy Huebner


-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of 
Arbogast, Warren K
Sent: Monday, August 06, 2012 3:13 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] Slow backup

There is a Linux fileserver here that serves web content. It has 21 million 
files in one filesystem named /ip. There are over 4,500 directories at the 
second level of the filesystem. The server is running the 6.3.0.0 client, and 
has 2 virtual cpus and 16 GB of RAM.  Resourceutilization is set to 10, and 
currently there are six client sessions running.  I am looking for ways to 
accelerate the backup of this server since currently it never ends.

The filesystem is NFS mounted so a journal based backup won't work. Recently, 
we added four proxy agents, and are splitting up the one big filesystem among 
them using include/exclude statements. Here is one of the agent's 
include/exclude files.

exclude /ip/[g-z]*/.../*
include /ip/[a-f]*/.../*

__Since we added the proxies the proxy backups are copying many thousands of 
files, as if this were the first backup of the server as a whole. Is that 
expected behavior?

__Recently, the TSM server database is growing faster than it usually does, and 
I'm wondering whether there could be any correlation between the ultra long 
running backup, many thousands of files copied, and the faster pace of the 
database growth.

__The four proxies haven't made a  big difference in the run time of the 
backup. Could something else be done to speed it up?

Thank you,
Keith Arbogast
Indiana University



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