Re: [Networker] Why large incrementals on MS?

Some additional notes.

1. If this is a server where Exchange PST files may be stored (email
personal folders from Exchange), all it takes is for a user to open up
outlook and the archive bit is turned on. Do a search for *.pst and see if
you have many of those. You may find people with huge PST files that have
archive bits turned on only because Outlook was opened.
2. Make sure someone with security access did not set up a directory where
the account that handles the service for Legato backups was only given read
access to a directory but not access to turn off the archive bit.
3. If 2 is true you may also want to verify that you are not being locked
out of other directories where no access is given to the account handling
backups.

James Rohrich
UOP LLC
25 E. Algonquin Rd.
Des Plaines, Illinois 60016
Tel: (847) 391-3958
james.rohrich AT uop DOT com


-----Original Message-----
From: Ty Young [mailto:Phillip_Young AT I2 DOT COM]
Sent: Thursday, June 24, 2004 9:05 AM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTMAIL.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [Networker] Why large incrementals on MS?


Hey George.   Yeah, sounds like you're being hit by the archive bit thing.
If you set a system environment variable on such a win32 machine

NSR_AVOID_ARCHIVE

to a non-zero value (i.e. "1" or "true")

your problem may go away.   At our site we have seen this behavior exactly
when our virus software resets the archive bit low after scanning files on a
nightly basis.

-ty

Phillip T. ("Ty") Young, DMA
Backup/Recovery Systems Mgr.
Information Services & Technologies
i2 Technologies, Inc.



             George Sinclair
             <George.Sinclair@
             NOAA.GOV>                                                  To
             Sent by: Legato           NETWORKER AT LISTMAIL.TEMPLE DOT EDU
             NetWorker                                                  cc
             discussion
             <NETWORKER@LISTMA                                     Subject
             IL.TEMPLE.EDU>            [Networker] Why large incrementals
                                       on MS?

             06/24/2004 09:03
             AM


             Please respond to
             george.sinclair@n
                  oaa.gov






Hi,

We've been noticing that a specific MS NT machine is backing up a large
quantity of data during incrementals -- much more than we would expect. The
other thing we've noticed is that the size of the savesets always seems to
be the same for these incrementals. However, the size of these incrementals,
while they are bigger than we would think, are still much smaller than the
fulls, so that's good.

We have 3 client instances for this host. The first instance backs up 'All'
and uses the following custom directive:

<< "C:\" >>
skip:   pagefile.sys
skip:   Recycler

<< "C:\DIR" >>
+null:  *.*

<< "C:\winnt\temp" >>
+skip: .?* *.*

The next 2 client instances back up various specific paths under C:\DIR
(e.g. C:\DIR\A-B, C:\DIR\C-F ...) and these are the ones that we've been
seeing these large incrementals on. Each client instance uses the regular
directive: 'NT standard directives'. We have scaled back the frequency of
the fulls on this client, so it's now running fulls every other month ...
actually, the first week of every third month, but there have been some file
systems that forced a full prior, probably due to the fact that the client
index just ran out of space. I have since increased it from 2 months browse
to 3 months browse, and I'm hoping that will resolve that, but still doesn't
explain why the incrementals are so large in some cases. Should just be
backing up everything that's changed since the previous backup, so maybe a
lot is actually changing? Or maybe something is causing the time stamps to
change? My MS admin tells me that nothing should be changing that much on
there, and not that much is being added.

Sometime ago, I'd heard on this listing something about how the archive bit
can get turned on for files on an MS system, or something like that, wherein
this causes NetWorker to backup the file even though it hasn't changed? I
might have my terms wrong there, or maybe I'm confused with something else.
I don't know much about MS, but our MS admin tells me that these
incrementals should not be that large. We are running virus protection
software. Could this be causing this?

I just need to get some ideas together so when I sit down with our MS
pundit, I can tell him what we need to be looking for that might be causing
this behavior. We just want to make certain that we've checked all the
"known" causes of this.

We're running 6.1.1 on our server (Solaris 2.8).

Any advice on clues to look for?

Thanks.

George

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